I work in a ~60 unit townhouse complex and we’ve had a lot of construction going on around us for the last 3 months. Towards the end of the day on Tuesday a “maintenance man” came in and told me he had to test for fiber optic compatibility. Alright, I’m just afraid this is going to take awhile but I let him get to it in the storage room. About 10 minutes later, he’s done, walks by my desk on the way out the door and gives a friendly wave and says “That’s all I need for now, thank you!” I was just excited he was done before the office closed.
Fast forward to yesterday and my boss heads back to the storage room after entering in some details from a new application. “TOSSIT393 DID YOU DO SOMETHING WITH THE APPLICATIONS?” Of course I hadn’t and told him that and let him know the guy from the internet company was back there the day before. “What guy from the internet company?”.
That’s when I got that sinking feeling in my gut where you know something is just completely wrong.
I went back there and the entire section of the file cabinet with applications was completely empty. There should have been probably 200 there, one of which was mine, but instead there were 0. My boss called our internet provider and they had no idea about any guy showing up for a fiber optic test. At that point it was plainly obvious that the guy had stolen all of the applications.
These applications have Social Security numbers, current/former addresses, phone numbers, all sorts of personal information. We knew the shit was deep at this point so I called the police. When the police got there, they asked me all sorts of questions about the guy, but luckily we had security footage of him and his briefcase. You could make out some details with the footage but it’s in black and white.
Then we had to call up corporate and let them know what happened. They had us craft an email to send out to everyone who had put in an app with us over the last 2 years. Not 5 minutes after sending those out, the calls came in and didn’t stop for about 3 hours straight. People are pretty pissed off and rightly so.
A couple hours after we left yesterday I got a phone call from the guy above my boss who works for corporate telling me not to come into work Thursday or Friday. I’m pretty sure that means I’m going to be receiving an overnight FedEx envelope with my pink slip tomorrow.
TL;DR: Let a fake “maintenace man from our ISP” steal about 200 rental applications, including my own, putting all of those people, and their families, at huge risk for identity theft, probably getting fired for it.
Edit: Thank you all so much for the support. Most of what I’ve been reading makes me feel better about the situation, that almost anyone else would have done the same thing.
I will be filing for unemployment if they do end up firing me, which I’m 95% sure they will. I also put a fraud alert on my credit by calling one of the companies from the post on the stolen identity sub. Several people have asked why I’d just let someone into the back room and honestly, the guy’s story seemed normal to me. Our wifi modem is in the back and if he’s checking for an internet company that’s where I would think he’d want to check.
The inside job theory might hold water since there are a lot of people who used to work here over the last few years who have quit and a couple who got fired.
I’m going to be talking to my boss after he’s off of work to see what’s going on. I’ll update again at that point.