Yesterday I received the following email at 10am from my credit card provider:-
This message confirms your Secure password has been changed. Your old password is no longer valid.
If you did not change your password, please contact us immediately.Initially I thought it was hoax email but to cut a long story short I telephoned the credit card company, informing them I hadn't changed my password. They told me someone had pretended to be me and got past their telephone security and managed to change my address. This was just after 9am. They had also started making test purchases on the credit card, luckily only £1 and £8.
The account has now been closed but initial investigations seem to reveal that I was an easy target as I am a company Director and therefore my date of birth was easily obtained from Companies House.
They reckon my mother's maiden name was probably obtained from a family tree website (not one that I had anything to do with).
The credit card company cannot guarantee that this will not happen again.
It begs the question, what checks do Companies House put in place before allowing an individual to gain access to sensitive data?
It seems that whatever you do to try and prevent things like this from happening e.g. shredding documents and taking care with your credit cards, government departments will still make it easy for the criminal!
