Identity Theft and Other Indignities

Some rather large businesses have pissed me off lately, and because I can’t get them to respond to me, and I’m not sufficiently important that they feel they should treat me well so I’m going to tell you about it. Not that it’s going to do any good, but maybe I’ll feel better. Maybe being the operative word here.

First to Walmart.com who let someone hack my account, change the email address and password and charge $300 worth of stuff on a debit card. (Do you know how hard it is to get your money back when someone steals it from a debit card? Good Lord, it’s nigh impossible. I’ve been working on this for WEEKS and still no joy.

This is what happened: On January 13 someone hacked into my Walmart.com account. Which I might add I’d only had since December because they had the best prices on Calendars. They printed the calendars wrong too, so I was already unhappy. The Hacker then changed the email, changed the user name to the new email and changed the password so I was effectively locked out. And then bought $300 dollars worth of Itunes cards.

Here’s where I think Walmart was in error: First, they didn’t send an email to my original email address confirming that I’d made the change. If they’d taken that simple step we may have been able to prevent what came next. Second, they allowed a complete stranger to buy Itunes cards without asking for the three digit number on the back of the card. That is criminal in my mind. Now after weeks and weeks of jumping through hoops – filling out the official Fraud forms, getting a police report, making a statement, getting that notarized, I still haven’t gotten my money back. Every time I thought I’d taken care of it they came back with something new. Then today they sent me the statements that proove I’ve been ripped off. But nothing more.

I’m more than a little perterbed. I asked my bank what to do. They said if you’ve gone as far as you can with Walmart then we’ll take care of it. So we’ll see. Maybe it will be resolved from the bank’s end, but I’m not hopeful as of now.

Then there is Itunes.com. It’s a long story, I’m not going to tell the whole thing. Or maybe I will… My son was given a new Ipod as a gift. Our old mac computer is not compatible with the new device, and it cannot be made compatible because it doesn’t have sufficient memory. So we set up the new Ipod with the little Windows computer the kids have. But now the problem is that we can’t get the music from the old computer to the new computer. We could turn on home sharing, but the cost of importing all those files over our rinkydink internet connection (wifi) would be astronomical. Might as well just rebuy the whole shabang. That would cost a few hundred dollars.

Well then I saw the thing about the Itunes cloud. That’s be good right? If all his music was in the cloud? So I paid for that – only to find out that the cloud won’t work with our old machine so he can’t get his music after all. Would Itunes refund our money? No. And no one would answer my questions as to why. Just “it’s policy.” Et tu Apple? You are no longer one of my favorite companies. Since when do you act like greedy corporate monsters? I can’t tell you how disappointed I am in Apple for this whole thing. We can’t effing use the cloud but I have to pay for it anyway. Nice.

I could go on, but I see this post is getting a little long. I can only complain for so long before I feel like I’m over doing the whine.

My advice? Stay away from Walmart.com and eschew the cloud at Itunes.

Okay, I have to take one part back. They did send me an email about the change. It was in my spam. They did that part okay, but they still let the guy buy stuff on my account when he didn’t have the three digit number on the back of the card. Still in the wrong if you ask me.  And WHY is no one willing to go after the guy/girl who did this? They have an email address. I suppose all the documentation behind it would be false. But still…