This is one of those things that I don’t want to blow out of proportion, but I’ve heard enough weirdness in a day to suggest you go out and take a look. Earlier today esteemed twitterer Saianel mentioned that his accounts had unusual entries in the phone number field. This has been corroborated by many people since then.
Everyone should check their RedBird accounts. System bug populated unknown phone numbers in my profile. Accounts hacker? I deleted them all
— Saianel (@saianel) April 7, 2015
In unrelated news, a thread started up on the forum about people regarding IRS tax refund fraud. These bastards are filing returns in your name and asking for payment to be remitted via electronic transfer. There was a great tip from a member that you can demand a PIN from the IRS for eFiling that should put the breaks on these people. Head on over here to get one. UPDATE – seems that the Identity Protection PIN is actually only available ‘pre-emptively’ only for residents of Florida, Georgia and DC Here.
Stay safe – and follow Saianel, he’s very funny for an American.
I just checked all of my Redbirds. More than half of them had a new phone number added that I did not add. However, most of these numbers were mixups of my real numbers. I removed all of these numbers and changed my password just in case, but I’m guessing this is a system issue, not a hack.
Mine all has extra numbers added, and some of them had a new primary number, which is the number Amex will call if there are issues. Not so confident it was a system issue.
I don’t know for sure, but I would ask the question of whether folks reporting the weird numbers purchased their RedBirds themselves, or got them from a friend that had them available locally. I suspect that the numbers may have somehow been loaded from the information provided at checkout (where you put in phone numbers and stuff).
@Trevor – that is the conclusion I came to as well, the number provided to Target on the Temporary cards.
The identity buggers nabbed me two years ago on filing a tax return using my SSN. I was due a refund that year and it took 14 months for the IRS to verify I was the real slim shady. I would highly recommend getting a PIN verification. My SSN was used in no other way, just the tax return.
I manage two accounts. One I purchased myself, one which was picked up by a friend of a friend. That one had extra numbers, the one I got directly from target only had the phone number I provided originally.
Don’t know why I didn’t check it when setting it up online. Thanks very much for posting.
When we go to Target to activate temporary Redbird cards to sell them online, we have to put a phone nr, and that number shows up on the profile of the person registering for the permanent acct. You can obviously delete that nr and add yours, you should do that.
Not sure if this was the case here or not.