This morning I opened my email to find that my credit file had been sent to me. This is nothing abnormal, I subscribe to a service from the evil and oppertunistic company Baycorp Advantage. They are a private company that maintaints credit information on every Australian. They have no government oversight, and as their revenue comes from companies that provide credit – there focus is obviously towards them. As any person who has ever tried to dispute something recorded on your CRA file will know – Baycorp do not really care, nor will they ever make a change.
Within my file was a note that one of my current credit providers was “Diners Club”. This probably would be fine for a lot of people but not for me as I do not have a Diners Club Card.
As soon as I got to the office this morning I tried calling Baycop Advantage. They only list one number on their site – 1300 nnnnnn, which is only accessable from Australia. I have emailed their support address email@email and am yet to get a reply with a number that will work from Japan.
I thought it also prudent to call Diners Club. They also only list one number, 1300nnnnnn, but it is at least accessable from outside of the country. Regardless of what option you choose, you end up at an Indian call centre (before anybody attacks me for guessing that it was, I asked every time and to their credit they answered truthfully). The second time I called as I could not understand the first person, I was told “I am very well train ed …” (yes train ed) “…to support you in your calling”. I probably don’t need to explain just how much confidence this gave me that these people in India were going to give me the support that I needed.
After explaining myself several times, I was given the number of the diners club fraud department in Australia, 1300 730 142.
So far I have called this number 4 times today. Each about 1 hour apart. The first three times I left a message with all my details, the fourth it just rang out.
I will update when I have any more news.
The Identity Theft – First Hand by Troy Kelly, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
