Consumer complaint received 2020-04-17
Company: BARCLAYS BANK DELAWARE
Product: Credit card or prepaid card
Sub-product: General-purpose credit card or charge card
Issue: Getting a credit card
Sub-issue: Card opened as result of identity theft or fraud

Complaint:
Hi CFPB I am a legal resident in XXXX and have never set foot in a United States territory. Today I just realize I may have become either ( 1 ) a victim of identity theft OR ( 2 ) a victim of corporate banking reckless behavior. I need your help to get an answer from Barclay Bank US and get to the bottom of this. 

On Friday XX/XX/2020 at XXXX ( XXXX Eastern Standard Time ) I received an email in my personal XXXX  address with " Congratulations, youve been approved for the Barclaycard Financing Visa '' in the subject. The content of the email says that I'd been approved for a Barclay Financing Visa card ending XXXX ( email attached at next stage ). It also says " As a new card member, you can get special financing on purchases made at XXXX within 30 days of opening your account '' Five minutes later at XXXX and XXXX ( XXXXEST ) I received 2 other emails from XXXX to verify my XXXX XXXX. To give you some background information, I may have created an XXXX XXXX more than 3 years ago by mistake but never used it for any purposes. I have never owned any XXXX device XXXX XXXX or XXXX or XXXX computer ) whatsoever. 

Upon receiving the above-mentioned emails, I thought they were either ( 1 ) phishing emails by scammers to try to me click on the emails ( 2 ) genuine emails from Barclay and XXXX but the real individual who initiated this card application had made a spelling or typo mistake when typing the email address and hence, they were sent to me. 
Not knowing for sure which category these emails could belong to and having no time to further investigate ( I'm still having a full time job at this time ), I made a decision to delete and ignore them completely. 

However, just around 12 hours later, I received a 2nd email from Barclay Card US with subject " Thanks for going paperless! '' and the main email contents are " Welcome to paperless statements for account ending in XXXX. As a courtesy, we will email you with a notification each month that your statement is available to be viewed online. Please make sure that your email address is up-to-date by going online and clicking on Your profile. If you are newly enrolled in paperless statements and had been receiving paper statements, you may receive one more paper statement in the mail depending on when your next statement closes. '' There is a also link for me to click on to " View Activity and Statements '' and another link to BarclaycardUS.com. This time I took a closer look at the links by hovering my mouse over them without clicking and noticed they are real and NOT phishing links. 

I started to realize this whole thing could be more serious than what I initially thought. How could Barclay approve me to have a credit card in my name without any ID or in-person verification, let alone any credit verification? I don't even live in the United States. Does Barclay need to have my physical address and my income statement before approving the card and if yes, how did they get it? I have never supplied those information to them. Or could it be that the card application was done by some thieves stealing access to my personal XXXX email address? I have no way to know for sure. 

What I have done so far before writing this complaint : ( 1 ) immediately changed my email password to a strong 10-digit password on all devices. 
( 2 ) rang Barclay International Call Collect XXXX listed on their website https : //cards.barclaycardus.com/banking/contact-us/ but was put on hold for 1 hour 10 minutes without any connection so I gave up. The call was made on Friday XX/XX/2020 at XXXX ( XXXX Eastern Standard Time ) What I have NOT done : I still have NOT clicked on any link in those concerned emails that I've received in fear of " automatically '' agreeing or authorizing something that could be insidiously embedded and I am not aware of. I have been over-cautious here because after all, I'm not computer genius and with all that banking fraudulent practices in the world, who could blame me? 

I would appreciate if CFPB could help me get an official answer from Barclay and also tell them to cancel this card. 

Thank you

Company public response: Company has responded to the consumer and the CFPB and chooses not to provide a public response
Company response to consumer: Closed with explanation