I have credit monitoring through Creditwise (credit card benefit from Capital One) and MyIDCare (I think this was from a data breach settlement though I forget which one). Yesterday Creditwise flagged a credit inquiry that I was not aware of from Barclays Bank. I do not have any accounts there, although I know sometimes the bank you do business with is not the one that shows up, so I guess it could have been legitimate?
I called Barclays through the number on their website (NOT the number that showed up on the credit report because who trusts that?). They did not have any record of an inquiry.
I went back to Creditwise and they said to contact the reporting company, so I contacted Transunion. They couldn’t tell me anything more about the inquiry, copy/pasted some instructions about reporting it to the federal government, then disconnected the chat.
As an aside, it is deeply problematic that Transunion won’t let me see anything or dispute anything without giving them and then verifying my phone number. Transunion should be launched into the sun.
Then MyIDCare also flagged the inquiry. My skepticism at the phone number listed for Barclays was validated, as the number at MyIDCare was DIFFERENT from the one at Creditwise. So I called MyIDCare. They basically said the same thing as Creditwise.
So I have two monitoring services that are unable to tell me literally anything more than the name of the bank and the date. I reported it at IdentityTheft.gov so I imagine some Dogebro is checking to see if he can hack my Venmo and ICE is looking at my citizenship status so that’s a good time.
There’s a Simpsons episode that’s applicable here (there always is), where we “fix” problems with increasingly worse problems until finally some problem resolves itself (here, the collapse of the global economy).