Should I be worried?

November 7, 2010 9:59 AM

Insurance salesmen recently got a lead with my name and an old phone number from somewhere--that number got 10-15 calls in the past few days. I also recently lost my wallet. Any possible connection?

Maybe I'm just being paranoid since I know identity theft is a possibility after losing a wallet, but I have no idea why else a bunch of salesmen would have called my parents (where I haven't lived for 8 years) trying to sell me insurance. Is there any reason an identity thief would try to sign up for insurance using my name and phone number? Links appreciated...

posted by _Silky_ to Grab Bag (2 answers total)

An identity thief could try social engineering techniques to "sell" one person insurance. But this isn't a very cost-effective approach for identity thieves to take. Better for an identity thief to cull data from a database and have many thousands of victims at once.

What is more likely is that some insurance company has a database linking your name to this old phone number and has decided to call you, based on the assumption that maybe you're in the market for insurance.

Correlation doesn't prove causation. It likely is a coincidence that your parents started receiving these calls around the same time that you lost your wallet.

All this having been said, it can't hurt to review your credit reports and see if anything is amiss. But I would not conclude on the basis of what you have said that having lost your wallet caused these calls.
posted by dfriedman at 10:43 AM on November 7, 2010 [1 favorite]

Did you file a police report about the lost wallet? I received a flood of mailers for chiropractic and legal services almost immediately following a car accident; apparently it's routine for their marketing department to order police reports and build mailing lists from them.
posted by bizwank at 10:45 AM on November 7, 2010 [2 favorites]