It was a complete nightmare and took me months to correct the problems. Despite the dealer picking her out of a photo lineup, video surviellance of her writing the forged checks, and her many previous convictions for this type of crime, the police were extremely uncooperative. I had to hound them for months before they would even take the matter to a judge (for a warrant). They finally issued a warrant, but refused to actually go attempt an arrest, telling me she’d ‘turn up eventually…at a traffic stop or something.’ In the meantime, even though my bank accounts were long closed, she could continue to write more checks against my old accounts and cause me more problems.

Although it was awful, the damage was somewhat minimized because I acted quickly, took every action available to me, and knew exactly who had done it. I had an idea of what information she could try to use against me.

My best protection was to add verbal passwords to all my accounts. Your personal information can be obtained easily, and used to ‘verify’ your identity; a password that only you know cannot.

I’m sorry to hear of your experience with those wretched checks.

Whenever I’ve gotten them in the mail, I’ve immediately called the issuer and firmly and sternly told them that I never, ever wanted the checks sent to me again. I explain to them that it’s an invitation to fraud waiting to happen. I tell them I want no part of that nonsense. So far, no more checks.

In my case, someone stole credit card checks out of my mailbox and wrote a couple….. another reason to get rid of credit cards…..

Probably saw it and took care of it within a week. Hopefully they didn’t even get to go on the flight!

As for me, I’ve had my CC company call me about suspicious purchases before (all were legit). I did once find a purchase that I didn’t make and the bank cleared it up right away (issued new card/numbers).

Your advice on checking statements daily is right on.

It took me about 45 days to find out, that’s when the American Express skip tracing phone calls started coming in. I can tell you that Amex was fabulous to deal with. They never pursued me any further. He applied for and received a gold Amex card, reapplied again when it was shut down for non-payment, then applied for two Visa cards and a MasterCard before I stopped him.

Yes, I prosecuted. It’s a felony in that state and he was given three years probation. Why prosecute my own brother? He’s gotten away with so many financial shenanigans that SOMEONE needed to make him face the music. This was the only time in his life that Mom and Dad couldn’t bail him out of his own financial mess. Mine was the THIRD identity he had stolen! Mom and Dad always settled it for him — hush hush — with the other victims.

It hasn’t been an easy road. My parents were angry at first but they finally settled down. He actually had the nerve to call me and tell me that “if I would only follow ‘Biblical principles of forgiveness,’ that he wouldn’t be in this mess.” That’s when I screamed at him to never call MY home ever again and literally threw my cordless phone through the wall.

I now monitor my credit, maintain a constant fraud alert on my credit report, and check my banking accounts several times every single day.

The biggest thing is forgiveness and I do admit it’s been hard. He has continued to attack me personally through my own blog, my friends, my parents, my nephews, etc. I have a strong “strike back” personality so it’s been really hard. He’s my only sibling, and I wish I had a brother I could count on.

I followed up by immediately calling the customer service number on the back of my card to verify that the original call I received was indeed from my card issuer and was not itself an attempt at identity theft. The good news is that my card issuer immediately raised a flag and denied the suspicious charges. The bad news is that I have no idea how the card was compromised in the first place.