Stolen Identities

A quick entry to report that our identity was stolen this week! I won't give out any specific details since the case will eventually go to court, but a couple of employees at a store my wife and I frequent got our credit card number and used it twice. The authorities already know who did it and were actually tipped off by the owners of the store, so we heard about it before we or the credit card company knew anything was wrong!

So, now we have to cancel our cards and get new ones, but that's nothing compared to some other folks who got fives times the number of charges we did. My wife already gave a statement and we should get our money "back" before we even have to pay the bill, so I think we were incredibly lucky it wasn't any worse. In the past something like this would have completely freaked me out, but now I think it's just the price you pay for living life these days. I put anything with our address on it through the shredder and keep our computers virus software updated, figuring it's the least I can do to keep our information safe. However, if someone wants the information bad enough they'll get it and there wouldn't be anything I could do about it.

To me, it's very similar to a quote I've heard about terrorism: "If you change what you do or who you are because of terrorism, they win." Of course it's easy for me to say that and it might seem an extreme example to some, but in terms of the stress your body goes through you can't let fear of any kind dominate your life. If you do, you haven't really been living anyway.