I just got a letter that opens the door to Matthew Rogers Identity Theft, Part III.

To review, part 1 was all my money being emptied from my bank account in December of 2004, thanks to 5/3 Bank authorizing transactions on an address I hadn’t used in two years; part 2 was when a drug conviction was attached to my driver’s license number because I have the same birth date, first and last name, height, and weight as some punk in Ft. Wayne, IN who, even at my age at the time, had a rap sheet as long as a Tom Clancy novel. Busy boy. That one was on my license record for almost two years before we noticed it in the summer of 2005 when we were trying to switch car insurance companies. Thank God I wasn’t pulled over for anything in that two-year timeframe, or I would have gotten to know the back seat of a police cruiser.

Anyway, back to the present: I got a letter from Purdue today, dated April 24, 2007:

Oh. That’s just freaking great. The letter continues…

Only 175 people. Lucky me. And fall of 2001 was the first semester I was at Purdue, so they managed to screw me over in almost no time flat. This was back when Purdue was stupid and used SSNs as your student identification number. If I’m just getting this letter now, and that data is five and a half years old, has it been accessible that whole time? Because of my other brushes with identity theft, I try to be very careful about my information. I shred everything that has my name, address, or bank information on it. I never order things from shady places on the Internet. I have a credit card with very strict fraud protection that I use as my sole purchasing agent online. I never post my address or birth date in publicly accessible places. Despite all this, there’s nothing you can do to prevent institutions you have to trust with your info — colleges, banks, etc — from screwing up on your behalf. Thank you, Purdue.