First Sprint Now Verizon–Another Identity Theft

I don’t own a cellphone.  However, given all the problems I have had with cellphone companies, I never plan to either.

I mentioned a few months ago that Sprint was sending me bills through my Gmail account for somebody else’s cellphone account.  After several months, I finally got this straightened out and am no longer getting billed from them.

Now, this week, through this same Gmail account, I started receiving notices of cellphone charges from Verizon.  After going through nearly a week of emailing back and forth with them, they finally said that they will be “taking care of the situation”.  Of course, I will believe that when I stop getting emails from them. 

It seems that somebody has been using my Gmail account as their point of reference to send their e-bills to just so they think they wouldn’t be responsible for the bill.  What’s worse is that in both of these cases, identity theft is prominent.  Yet, the biggest problem is that there is NO WAY to contact Google to let them know that this is happening.  I eventually did send an email to Google about my email problem and got back the canned response that sometimes accounts that have periods in them confuse accounts and thus route email incorrectly.  This wasn’t even what I was asking!  Of course that was over 6 months ago and I never heard from them again over this form of identity theft.

As I mentioned in a previous post awhile ago, Staples also used my email account (a different account,though) linking it to a credit card purchase that my mother made in one of their stores last year during the holiday season.  Unfortunately, after contacting the Better Business Bureau (a waste of time, by the way), Staples WOULD DO NOTHING even though they were guilty of identity theft.  Of course, Staples is king of the lying and identity theft.  Thankfully, other companies are a little bit better than they are when identity theft is called into question.  Sadly Staples will never learn.