James thinks that he might be the victim of a scam. Or a prank. Something strange is going on, with fraudulent credit card charges and phone calls from car insurance companies that he never requested. He’s not sure whether the two things are even related, or what they could mean.

This is an odd one. Hoping you — or the Consumerist community at large — can help me out. Like the subject line says, I’m a victim of ….something. I’m just not sure what it is. Here’s what I do know:

• There were 3 fraudulent Skype charges made against my debit card.
• Possibly unrelated, but within a week of that happening… I started getting these calls at home from car insurance companies, with information about the rate quote I requested. I have not requested car insurance rate quotes.

I’ve been contacted by at least 4 companies, and — because this whole thing made me paranoid — I ran a credit report. It had been over a year, so I did the FTC free credit report. The insurance companies are querying my credit history, and I think that enough queries against your credit history can negatively impact your credit rating. I can contact the credit agencies to fix that, but here’s my question:

What’s the scam? Why would someone be using my information to try to get car insurance quotes? As far as I can tell, the only accurate information they have is my name and address, which is pretty public record. I think the weirdest thing here is: Car insurance? Really? What’s the angle? I mean, people who run scams don’t seem like the sort of people who would be shopping around for insurance rates.

Have you ever heard of anything like this? Short of calling every national car agency and telling them “IT’S NOT ME, STOP IT!” is there anything I can do?

Well, no, that wouldn’t work. This sounds more like a prank than a scam to us. Have you been through anything similar? What’s the end game?

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