My wife had her pocket book stolen almost a year ago, and we went through the whole process of cancelling the credit cards, notifying the police, and freezing her credit file with Transunion, TRW, and Experian, just like good little consumers. We didn’t have to pay for the $50 in gas that was charged on one of the cards, and none of the attempts to use the debit cards went through. We thought everything was good.

Now, a number of months later, a small lingering effect raises its’ head. We have a shared Amex card, and we got brand new account numbers for them at the same time we got the other cards replaced. However, we forgot that we have a few automatic payments coming off that Amex account.

Apparently Amex was nice enough to continue paying on the recurring charges, like we wanted them to, up until this last month. I’m assuming that the date of expiration came up or something, because now I’m getting little ‘did you forget?!??’ messages from a few of my automated bills. Nothing major, but slightly annoying.

Just to let everyone know of an additional step that I don’t think I’ve heard mentioned when it comes to recovering from Identity Theft. Don’t forget to update automatic billers with the new card numbers.

I don’t blame Amex or anything, and none of the billing companies have really given me that much of a hard time, so it’s a minor inconvenience. But it’s still an inconvenience.

Technorati : automatic, bills, card, credit, identity, theft