Scare of the day

Today Chris brought in our mail and found a letter from a collection agency, informing us that we owed $1800 on our Telus Mobility Account.

What?

Of course, being the Crazy Overreactor that I am, my first response was "Oh no! I forgot to pay our phone bill for...uh...eighteen months?"

Thankfully, Christopher's the sane one of the two of us, at times like these. He pointed out that this was obviously identity theft. First of all, we don't have an account with Telus Mobility. Our cell phones are through Bell. Sure, we have phone and internet through Telus, but that's separate from Mobility.

Being the rational man that he is, he called the collection agency, at the number they provided. It turns out that someone took out a cell phone account in Chris's name in June and ran up a huge bill. Actually, they managed to pay the bill for the first couple of months, and then stopped in August, at which point they ran up nearly $2000 of bill in a couple of months. And I can't believe that Telus actually let this person take out this account, since while they had Chris's name and address right, they had his birth date and Social Insurance Number all wrong. And how did we never receive a bill until we got this collection notice? (Update: it looks like they signed up with our address and then changed the address after a couple of months, meaning that they must have be stealing our mail for a few months at first? Or signed up for electronic billing?)

Ack. This is so not cool. And apparently Telus can't deal with any of this today, because their security office is closed for the day. (Note to self: make sure that they don't mess up Chris's credit record.)

Ack. Ack. Ack.