I’ve Paid For This Twice Already…

Who the hell is Certegy?

I wish I still didn’t know.  And I wish I knew how they knew about me.

Yesterday in the mail I got a letter from a company called Certegy forwarded from my old apartment address.  It looked like junk mail but lucky for me I opened it anyway.  Inside is a letter telling me that one of their employees stole data from them possibly including my name, address, and/or bank account number and sold it to a bunch of telemarketers/direct mail people.

Um…. WHAT?  Who the hell are you and why do you even have this information?

Apparently Certegy provides check authorization services to a bunch of retailers.  What I don’t understand is… I seriously CANNOT remember the last time I wrote a check for something at a store.  Like… never.  Is using a debit card the same?  It doesn’t say anything about debit cards, and the last four digits of the account at the top of this letter is definately my bank account not my debit card.  Is this from online banking?  That’s the only thing I can think of although I’m not doing online banking with Walmart or Home Depot.  But I do pay several of my monthly bills online.  But again, I don’t have monthly bills to a retailer.

So seriously…. why does Certegy have information about me?  Why don’t they tell me *that* in the letter instead of useless garbage about how they think my information is not being used for identity theft but instead to send me more junk mail.  I had to research Certegy online to even figure out why they might have any information about me at all.

I’m confused.  I’m not sure what to do either.  Anything from closing my bank account to just watching for activity.  I may put a fraud alert on my credit report but I am afraid that will mess up the credit card we recently applied for to transfer our balance.  I will say this though:  if I figure out how Certegy got my information, that’ll be the first place that will lose my business completely.

My last name is rather unique and hyphenated, and seriously every junk mail peep does something else stupid to it.  I haven’t gotten any junk mail recently with Certegy’s version of my last name.

Oh, and Certegy says they were “victimized”.  Um…. no, that’d be ME you idiots.  Save the violins cause I am sure I’m not the only person pretty mad right now.

~J

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