Back before Gartner I ran my own consulting/development business for a while. It was reasonably successful, but when a better opportunity came up I shut down operations and joined the company that Gartner eventually acquired.

I closed the business about 7 years ago. There are no remaining bank accounts, domains registered to it, business licenses, or anything else possibly connected to it. The old domain name still exists (registered to me personally) since it’s my permanent email, but the website forwards to my joke evilsquirrel site. I ran the business out of Boulder and have moved twice since then, with neither address being associated with the dearly departed corporation.

Thus, for the life of me, I can’t figure out why Capital One is sending my dead business credit card solicitations to my current residential address.

As far as I can tell there must be some database somewhere with the remnants of the old corp, tied to my SSN (as President and CEO), and they naturally assume I might want one of their credit cards. They’ve connected this with some current database of addresses and tracked me down as an individual to my current address. Don’t you think their fraud systems might consider offering credit to an unregistered, unlicensed business a bit of a risk?

And you wonder why we have an identity theft problem?!?

It has nothing to do with the Internet, and everything to do with easy credit and abuse of our personal information and databases by financial services.

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