You can click the "Contact Us" link at the bottom and ask Gardenweb to remove it.

Thanks! Consider it DONE!

I've grown a little attached to it...

cmarlin20 -- hee hee! Well, I DID write to GardenWeb, but nothing's happened. Will it be too traumatic if they finally remove it? Nah, probably not. I think of it as a sort of 'barnacle'.

okay, I'll think barnacle whenever I see it. Life will go on....

"In December I posted about being on telephone hold while checking out a possible identity theft problem."

How did that call work out?

dreamgarden -- Oh, so the suspense has been building, eh? LOL I'll try to make this shorter than I experienced it.

In late November/early December DH and I decided we had to replace our mattress -- more like a pair of hammocks! Carson's had a sale, and if you opened an account you'd get an additional 10% off. (We'd had an account years ago, but the salesman said if it had been dormant for 10 years, we could open a new account.)

The salesman phoned the store credit division and put my DH on the phone. Part of the information required was my DH's soc. sec. number. They would not process without it, so DH provided it. The credit person said it matched ANOTHER MAN! And, they wouldn't issue us a CC because they couldn't verify our credit -- we have that info frozen.

OK, we get the mattress ordered -- credit to be settled later, and Sue goes into battle mode on the telephone. It's a weekend. You can't reach soc. sec. You can't TALK to anyone at any of the three credit reporting companies.

I even asked a policeman friend to run the other man's name -- didn't come back with DH's soc. but did come back related somehow to an old address of ours. WEIRD!

On Monday I was able to reassure myself that the cross-over on the soc. sec. numbers was probably only an error in the credit office of Carson's. I lifted the freeze long enough for Carson's to verify us. I never did figure out how the other guy's name came up with our old house.

Oh, the REST of this tale is that the mattrress was AWFUL -- started to sag in a week. It cost us the $100 we'd saved on the deal to get them to take it back. And we weren't done yet! The guys removing the mattress damaged our front door! That has taken six months to resolve.

We should have just gone back to Verlo for a new mattress in the first place, which is what we finally did.

Oh, the 'telephone hold' probably added at least a full day to my frantic phoning, looking for the phantom 'identity thief'.

"dreamgarden -- Oh, so the suspense has been building, eh?"

Yes! LOL. Thanks for the follow up about the day spent in telephone purgatory!

Your experience is just one reason why I refuse to sign up for store cards in order to save money. Not worth the hassle to save 10%.

The decision to freeze your credit was a good one. I think its ridiculous that the credit reporting bureaus aren't available (or have a hotline you can call) on the weekends for issues like yours. After all, criminals don't take the weekend off!

Would be interesting to know how your DH's ss# got mixed up with the other guys'. Did you ever have any similar issues when you lived at the old address? Is it possible that the next owner/tenant at your old place could have opened mail that wasn't forwarded to you and used it to try and compile a new identity?

How is the mattress you got at Verlo? Is it any better than the other? Your fortunate that you were able to return it. We purchased a new mattress a short while ago and don't care for it for the same reason you described. Sags in the middle. Unfortunately we took the plastic off so we can't return it. Might just put a memory foam/featherbed topper on it until we figure out where we will buy the next one.

Oh well, live and learn!

If we hadn't been buying a big ticket item we wouldn't have gotten into the store's CC. We were 'saving' $100 and getting free delivery -- hah! So...we had to give them the $100 we'd 'saved' to take the thing back. First, though we had to have the 'mattress police' come and check to see if the mattress was *defective*. (They said it wasn't sagging the required amount: over 1 1/2 inches! Tell it to my backbone!)

The only guess I have on the soc. sec. mixup is that this person may have been a PRIOR owner of our house. We were third or fourth owners. It's not our buyers, who are still there. It's not the owner from whom we bought in 1971. My police source said he's seen similar 'crosswiring' and not to worry about it as long as our credit reports are clean.

Oh, that's another peculiar thing. Our credit isn't as good as I thought it would be. I haven't given it a thought because we haven't applied to buy anything on credit since forever and a day.

We've had the same two cards for probably 35 years -- always paid off the balances monthly. So we've never OWED anything that we had to 'pay off'. We paid off a mortgage years ago. We own real property outright and pay all our bills on time. We are evidently not living properly to have A#1 credit ratings! LOL

Forgot to answer about Verlo. We've used them for decades. Just got lured away by the siren song of a 'sale'. Mistake.

Happy with the new Verlo. There was one heavier, firmer style I liked somewhat better, but decided to go with the slightly less substantial set, planning to replace it sooner.

All our Verlo's have been great for 10+ years, but really heavy to flip. (I noticed the Sealy we returned was insubstantial, very light weight.)

"Oh, that's another peculiar thing. Our credit isn't as good as I thought it would be. I haven't given it a thought because we haven't applied to buy anything on credit since forever and a day.

We own real property outright and pay all our bills on time. We are evidently not living properly to have A#1 credit ratings! LOL"

Funny (not) about that. We are in the same shoes. Zero debt, pay all bills on time and never go over our limits either. While we receive our credit reports each year, we haven't paid for a FICO score in awhile. It will be interesting to see what it looks like now that all the banks FICO scores are hurting as well. lol! Maybe I'll ask our banker if he will check it for us.

Thanks for the input about mattresses, you'd think buying one would be a no-brainer. Hope your new one works out and lasts awhile before you have to replace it again.

I think the issue with the old post is that no one has ever responded to it, so the forum software bumps it to the top above all other posts that have had responses.

To test this hypothesis, I'll post a small response to the "barnacle" post, and as long as no one posts further follow-ups, to bump it up, it should proceed down into obscurity in an orderly manner.

Hmmm. No such luck. The post is so old the software doesn't allow any follow-ups.

I guess you probably already tried that. :-)

Long live the "barnacle" post.

Actually, that post didn't allow responses at all from the very first day it was 'posted'. It was at a time when there were a lot of buggy things happening to the software. The problem may be that there isn't enough traffic on this forum to move it down thru natural attrition.