Identity theft: An invoice for a thousand euros and a lot of work to sort things out
In March 2019, Niko Norisalo received a payment reminder from a consumer credit service in the mail in spite of not having taken out any such loans. Even though he had always tried to be careful about information security, he had become the victim of identity theft.
“The letter was about a thousand-euro loan taken out in my name in January. The interest rate was also quite high. It took until March for the invoice to reach me because the address information in the consumer credit service was a wrong address given by the identity thief,” Norisalo explains.
He immediately called the company that had issued the loan.
“I was told to file a police report. After I did that, I set up a voluntary credit stoppage for myself on all credit information services so that my name could not be used to buy anything on credit,” Norisalo recalls.
As a result of his experience, Norisalo decided to start using Asiakastieto’s Minun Omatietoni service, which automatically notifies the user whenever an enquiry is made regarding their credit information and reveals who made the enquiry. The automatic monitoring of credit information allows the user to react immediately in the event of an attempt to use their personal data without authorisation.
“In my case, the identity theft was only revealed a couple of months after the fact. These days, many people recognise the need to protect their phones and computers with information security services, but they may forget about protecting their personal data. Minun Omatietoni is a data security service for your own personal data,” Norisalo says.
