I called the number on the back of one of my actual credit cards and asked them how to pull my full credit report. Then I called the credit bureaus and pulled it.
## The Full Report and What It Contained
The report showed the loan clearly: origination date approximately eleven months prior, lender name, balance, payment history. The address used on the application was the address of the house I had grown up in — my parents’ house, or rather my mother’s house, since my father had been gone for nine years and the house was hers now.
I had moved out at twenty-two. I had not used that address for anything official in years. I updated my address with every credit card, every financial account, every institution I dealt with, when I moved. The address on the loan application was not a current address. It was an old one. Which meant whoever had filled out the application had either used very old records or had access to old documents — old mail, old forms, old records stored somewhere in that house.
I kept that thought in a separate part of my brain for a while and kept looking at the report.
The payment history on the loan showed that payments had been made. Not perfectly — there were a couple of months marked as slightly late — but mostly, someone had been making monthly payments on this $28,000 loan, consistently, for almost a year. Whoever had taken out the loan was, in some sense, servicing it. Which suggested this was not a smash-and-grab identity theft situation where someone had maxed out my identity and disappeared. This was something else.