Car buyer mistaken as terrorist

[Newsjock]

Source: Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Sandra Cortez went to buy a new car on her lunch break, and about an hour later, the Denver dealership staff was threatening to call the FBI to haul her away as a suspected terrorist.

The dealership's routine check of Cortez's credit report turned up something unusual on that day in 2005. It was an alert indicating that the woman was on a government list of suspected terrorists, international drug traffickers and others associated with weapons of mass destruction.

... The ordeal engulfed the grandmother for the next five years. Her many attempts to fix the problem with TransUnion and the federal government on her own all failed. Cortez pleaded with the credit-reporting agency to correct her credit history but received no help.

She eventually hired Jim Francis, a consumer-law attorney in Philadelphia, and sued TransUnion. Cortez endured a grueling legal battle that included a trial and years of appeals. She originally was awarded $750,000 by a jury, but that later was reduced to $150,000. And the government took about a third of it in taxes.

Read more: http://www.ajc.com/business/car-buyer-mistaken-as-1478371.html

[d_r]

1. wait

credit reports now have a column for being a suspected terrorist?

[progressivebydesign]

2. 2005. I could have guessed what regime was in power then. sheesh. n/t

[Politicalboi]

3. Wouldn't be surprised

If the same couldn't happen again today. The President doesn't make the list himself as you know. I am NOT a Bush lover, but with Homeland Security it could happen again today. They feel they are never wrong.

[SheilaT]

4. So many things occur to me about this.

One is, I suppose it's nice to know that suspected terrorists don't get to buy cars.

But the absurdity of a casual similarity of names boggles this little mind.
To me, Sandra Cortez is NOT the same as Sandra Cortes Quintana. And it should not have been to anyone else along the way.

One genuine problem is that there are only so many names out there, and so most of us have the same name as at least one other person in this country, and sometimes a name you think isn't very common, turns out to belong to a surprising number of others. I see this almost every day in my job on the information desk at the hospital in the small city I live in. This area is largely Hispanic, and very often there are two people with the same first and last name here.

[lpbk2713]

5. The corporats win again.

She probably saw none of that $150K after court fees and all the other expenses involved; missing work etc.

In fact it would not surprise me if she ended up on the minus side. The system is rigged in the corporats favor.