Smashed Window

On Friday Night around 5:30 April and I returned to our Civic after a hike to find out that the blond hair girl in her twenties that was standing by the map when we pulled into the parking lot had used a rock to break our window and steal April's purse and keys out of the locked trunk (she broke the window and pulled the trunk release). Within about 1.5 hours she had charged over a $1,000 at Kmart, Red Lobster, Walmart and Kroger.

When I get through a situation like this I do my best to share some of what I have learned. Perhaps some of the following I wrote up will help you if you ever end up in the same place.

Couple Lessons Learned

1. Do not leave anything in your car....even if it is out of sight. Doesn't matter if your car is in a busy area.

2. Even criminals have poor aim as shown by the dents in my door from where she missed while breaking the window.

3. Glass is very sharp.... flip your floor mats over and sit on them for the ride home.

4. Criminals do not care if you can provide a description of them.

5. Do go to the places they used your credit card if it is a place like Red Lobster. We went to Red Lobster and had them reset the balance on the $100 gift certificate she bought to zero. Our visit confirmed that it was the little blond hair girl that came in and bought the gift certificate. She did wear sunglasses the whole time to conceal her identity. It would be priceless to be at Red Lobster when she goes to pay with the $100 gift certificate and the balance is 0.

6. Friends like ours in Huntsville (Rainoldi's) will drop everything to drive to your house while you spend two hours with the police to make sure they did not use April's license and apartment keys to help themselves (yes Josh TV is ok).

7. Always keep photo copies of every card in your wallet/purse at home in a safe place or a list of every card number. This list I had helped us know what was missing and I also had written down numbers you use to cancel the cards. We needed April's drivers license number at one point and it was on the list.

8. Do not ever carry your social security number with you or anything that has it on it. Also do not carry anything with you that has pin numbers on it. They got a lot from us but not any of this type of information.

9. Pass code your phone if you have sensitive information on it. Mine is now set to an hour timer. This way they can not get at anything on my phone or use it.

10. Do call the three credit bureaus and put a fraud alert on your credit report. This means that if they try to open a credit card or do any similar transaction a fraud alert will appear and the person running check is told to call a number you provide when putting the fraud alert on the account. This is free and stays in place for 90 days.

Consumer Fraud Division
Phone: 800-525-6285 or: 404-885-8000
Fax: 770-375-2821

P.O. Box 740241
Atlanta, GA 30374-0241
Experian's National Consumer Assistance
Phone: 888-397-3742

P.O. Box 2104
Allen, TX 75013
Fraud Victim Assistance Department
Phone: 800-680-7289
Fax: 714-447-6034

P.O. Box 6790
Fullerton, CA 92634-6790

11. Do request a free credit report once a year http://www.annualcreditreport.com/

12. No matter how mad you are...start calling your credit card companies right away. You will not have to pay for the charges but who wants the criminal to get anything for free.

13. Yes there are still lots of great people in the world....the maintenance manager at our apartment building came over at 9 PM on Friday night and changed all of our locks including our mailbox at no charge.


Hope the list helps!