It was an average weeknight for Jenn Lee and her nine-year-old son.
The pair was getting home late one night, like they often do after a full day of work and after-school activities. Lee opened her front door, dropped her keys on a table, grabbed the trash and took it out to the bin.
When she got back inside, she noticed her son’s video games and console were pulled out from under the TV. She scolded her son for making a mess and went about her business, still slightly perturbed about the video games.
When she entered the kitchen and slowed down for a minute, she noticed the back window of her townhouse was open, and her son’s guitars were leaning below it. She slowly looked around and noticed that several things were strewn about.
Immediately, she knew something was wrong and ran upstairs, where she found bits and pieces of her jewelry tossed around her bedroom, and an empty hope chest was tossed on the bed.
That’s when she knew someone had broken into her home and stolen her valuables – including two laptop computers.
“It had my whole life on it,” Lee said, choking back tears. “Years of work, everything, is on my computer.”
The loss of the laptops hit Lee hard, but she worries it has hit her son the hardest because he lost all of his music, which he wrote and recorded himself.
“It’s not just stuff, it’s my child’s life,” she said. “I’m just so sad for my son.”
But the single mother’s suffering wasn’t over yet.
After calling the Burnaby RCMP and spending the night going over what happened with officers, she awoke the next morning to several voice mails from her bank informing her someone was trying to transfer large sums of money out of her account.
“I’ve had problems in the past with someone writing cheques out of my account, so I have a fraud alert if anything suspicious happens,” she said.
Lee was shocked someone was able to hack into her online banking accounts so quickly, it hadn’t even been 24 hours since the laptops were stolen.
“Everything is password protected, too,” she said. “Didn’t seem to matter though.”
Money transfers were just the beginning. Later that same day, the bank contacted her again – someone was trying to order credit cards in her name.
Lee is just one of the tens of thousands of Canadians targeted by identity thieves and fraudsters each year.
March is anti-fraud month and police across the country are encouraging people to protect their personal information.
The Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre is a government agency made up of police services and RCMP detachments from across the country. The national agency receives about 120,000 calls each year from people reporting fraud attempts.
The centre provides a number of tips on preventing fraud, from shredding all documents with personal information on them to checking credit card bills and statements for abnormalities.
But for Lee, it’s already too late.
While she was able to stop the thieves from transferring her money and making credit cards in her name, she is still haunted by how easily they accessed her accounts.
“People need to know how easily people can get anything off your computer,” she said. “I can’t believe they got into my accounts.”
Without insurance and a limited budget, Lee is hoping the laptops will be recovered or returned, at least for her son’s sake.
“I hate seeing him so sad,” she said.
Lee is asking anyone who may come across her Toshiba laptop or her son’s Macbook to return them to the Burnaby RCMP.
For more information on identity theft and fraud, visit www.antifraudcentre-centreantifraude.ca.
