Passport & cards temporarily out of my hands - any flagging needed?

March 12, 2015 2:28 PM

I left a bag on a plane last night; thankfully it was taken by airline staff to the airport's Lost and Found office and I will pick it up tonight. In it (still) are my U.S. passport, an American Express card, and Visa debit cards from two different bank accts. This is a small airport in a remote Scandinavian town with an extremely low crime rate. No activity today on any of the cards. Still, do I need to put any sort of identity-theft flags on passport and/or on cards?
posted by anonymous to Work & Money (10 answers total)

Report the passport to the U.S. embassy (by phone is fine) or consulate if there's one nearby. Call the banks and AmEx to tell them what happened and put a fraud watch on your accounts, but tell them where you'll be over the next couple of weeks so they know whether any action is unexpected. Get a local toll-free number if they have any, in case their fraud alert trips on a legitimate transaction. Use only one of the cards as much as possible, so if it gets tripped, you still have the other two available. And when you get home, call them up again and get the cards replaced just in case.

Odds are that nothing will happen, but if something does, you'll be better covered than if you don't tell them and they eventually find out the items were out of your possession.
posted by Etrigan at 2:34 PM on March 12, 2015

I wouldn't.
posted by pseudonick at 2:37 PM on March 12, 2015 [6 favorites]

I'd think it's unlikely that someone found your stuff, copied down the information, and then handed it in to the lost & found. It's also relatively improbable that the lost & found staff is doing a lot of identity theft. There's some chance of problems, yes, but I wouldn't expect to be that big an increase over the normal background radiation of risk from databases being hacked and ATM skimmers and so on. So if it were me, I'd maybe keep a slightly closer eye on my accounts for spurious activity for a while, but otherwise carry on normally.
posted by aubilenon at 2:45 PM on March 12, 2015

Lower odds of anything going wrong than when you hand your credit card to a waiter at a restaurant, or use any unfamiliar ATM. Not zero odds, certainly, but I'd shrug it off myself.

(Etrigan's position above is certainly the more correct one. OTOH, life's short.)
posted by RedOrGreen at 3:20 PM on March 12, 2015 [3 favorites]

The risk of tripping a fraud alert in a foreign country far outweighs the very minuscule risk that anyone tampered with your stuff. It's not good to be stuck traveling without readily available money, and you don't want to waste time on the phone if the fraud alert turns out to be too sensitive. It would be one thing if your bag was stolen, but it wasn't. Especially if you're in a position to be able to monitor your account activity.
posted by acidic at 3:37 PM on March 12, 2015 [4 favorites]

If it was me who did this, I would not think twice about it. But I'm kind of laid back in these matters.
posted by Rabarberofficer at 3:44 PM on March 12, 2015 [1 favorite]

Report the passport to the U.S. embassy (by phone is fine) or consulate if there's one nearby.

There is no reason to do this, no obligation to do this, and no point to doing it. Do not open this can of worms.
posted by DarlingBri at 5:02 PM on March 12, 2015 [6 favorites]

Seconding DarlingBri. I'm the person you'd report the missing passport to. Don't do that if you are going to get it back and use it again.
posted by whitewall at 6:39 PM on March 12, 2015 [7 favorites]

Do NOT report your passport unless you want to pay the over $200 fee for a replacement, file the application, get the application notarized at a passport rep, get 2 passport photos taken, Get your original birth certificate and mail it in (must be original not a copy), and wait 4 weeks for the replacement to be sent to you. If you'd rather not do all this, then I'd strongly recommend you just go and pick up your passport. Plus- there are cases when they don't even send you a new passport because they decide out of the blue they need "more information" which can include stupid things like a yearbook photo and middle school records...things that most people have a difficult time getting. Once you report it, they flag it as invalid and there's no way to remove the flag even if you tell them you now have it in your possession. Plus if you report it lost more than 2 or 3 times they may deny you a passport when you try to replace it so why get add a lost report to your record when the airline has it and you can avoid this?

I so would not report it if I were you. There are people I've known that have not known the whereabouts of their passport for months and refuse to report it because of the can of worms it opens up. They just hope against hope that it will turn up before they need to travel again. Kinda crazy, but sorta understandable too, considering.
posted by rancher at 11:31 PM on March 12, 2015

Don't do it! It'll be fine.

rancher - I left it 3 years with a lost passport because I assumed at some point I would find it. I've moved several times since and it's not showing up and I only just renewed it because I'm traveling in a few months. But it's the worst. Finding a place to get photos and then having them rejected is the nightmare I'm living right now.
posted by shesbenevolent at 12:10 PM on March 13, 2015 [1 favorite]