An Old Credit Card Coming Back to Haunt Us

Sometimes, when a credit card has long since been closed (7+ years), something happens and it comes back to haunt you.

Last month, we recieved a letter from Chase notifying us that they mistakenly identified some computer tapes as trash and threw them out. Those tapes had information on us from one of our old credit cards. Besides wondering how that could happen, I wonder about things that have happened that customers haven’t been notified about.

Unfortunately, they haven’t located the tapes. It doesn’t sit very well with me that this happened. I think as consumers, we place a lot of trust on businesses to take great care with our personal information. When something like this happens, it doesn’t make you feel very good.

I’m not sure what else to say about this. It’s one of those things that I think we do not have much control over as consumers. We just have to be vigilant with checking our credit reports. We were fortunate to find out about this mishap, but there have probably been others through the years that we haven’t been notified about.

To get a copy of your credit report for free, go to annualcreditreport.com. You can receive a copy of your report once every 12 months from each of the three nationwide credit reporting companies: Experian, Equifax and TransUnion.

Posted by Tricia on November 8, 2006 at 2:21 PM in Credit Cards, Credit Reports/FICO | 2 Comments »
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Golbguru responded:
Posted: November 9th, 2006 at 4:39 am
That’s bad. Hopefully it will not cause you any trouble in future. It’s one thing to “trash” tapes and it’s another thing when these tapes find their way out of trash and into the hands of a miscreant. The likelyhood of both these things happening might be very less…so you still have some hopes.
debtinseattle responded:
Posted: November 9th, 2006 at 4:14 pm
Hi Tricia,

Ya know we have a Chase card & we really don’t like them. They seem to always be misplacing or not documenting any of our information. We sent them several requests online to udpate our new address; I even wrote a couple of letters & we are still getting bills being forwarded to our new address vs. being sent directly to us.

Hang in there!