"Memory Theft": can it lead to "trading point of view"? Not quite identity theft

I’ve talked about identity theft a lot here, but what about something lower level, memory theft?

That occurs when some tells someone else’s story as if it were theirs and may actually think it happened to them (particularly with sexual or intimate events).

Psychology Today had a revealing article by Ira Hyman, Ph. D., on April 28, 2015.   This concept is possibly relevant to my novel in development, “Angel’s Brother”.  And in my screenplay Ephiphany I propose that people can share accounts telepathically through special brain reading software controlled by an “outside auditor” character who decides the permission levels for other characters on the space ship.  

  

Short film by Ollieread is called “Remember Me #3” based on a game.

Payroll processing company gets in trouble, it seems some employees of clients get stiffed, at least temporarily

Employees of various small businesses suddenly found payroll deposits withdrawn, sometimes mistakenly several times, as a result of an apparent collapse of a payroll services firm, MyPayrollHR. Patrick Thobodeau explains for Techtarget here. 

An intermediary company Cachet in California seems to be intervening to restore accounts.

  

But it is not clear how long it will take to restore payroll amounts stolen or whether some employees could be stiffed, having to beg on social media crowdfunding sites.

The FBI is involved.

This is an incredible case.

Con man gets hired as surgical assistant in California, steals data of patients and employees

NBC Los Angeles (Eric Leonard et al)  reports that a surgical assistant played “catch me if you can” with hospitals and stole data from patients and employees 

This seems rather incredible that he got to work in an O.R. with no adequate check on his identity.

   

It’s unclear if he has compromised the identities of a number of patients.

Scattered hospitals garnish wages, place liens on homes for medical debt

There are various reports of a few hospitals becoming aggressive in collecting medical debts, with he New York Times having a major story by Laura Beil about Carlsbad Hospital in southern New Mexico.  Very recently, the hospital has agreed to back off on lower income patients.  But the hospital has been reported to garnish wages.

A site called Accounts Recovery also discusses the lack of competition problem for some hospitals. 

But Jay Hancock and Elizabeth Lucas of The Washington Post report similar problems with the University of Virginia Medical Center, Charlottesville, resulting sometimes in liens on homes.

When I worked for debt collector RMA near MSP airport in 2003, the company had a medical debt operation. 

Reporters have discussed the recent book “The Price We Pay” from Marty Makary, MD, from Bloomsbury Publishing, available today on Amazon.

Experian replaces the company I used to work for in Dallas in the 80s; what has happened in three decades

Basia Hellwig of Investopedia has an informative article “Credit Karma v. Experian: What’s the Difference?’

The article selects what it calls the best known of the three large credit reporting companies as providing more information to consumers than the other two;  Credit Karma, by comparison, is free and scrapes all three.

Experian is an international company with headquarters in Dublin, Ireland.  In the US it has a large presence in McKinney, Texas, a distance suburb north of Dallas and Plano, along Highway 175.  In the 1980s (from 1981-1988) I worked for Chilton, which would be sold tor TRW in 1989, and then TRW credit would be spun off to become Experian later.  Experian more or less replaces Chilton as a major tech employer in the Dallas area. But Chilton’s Amdahl data center and programming support was located in Oak Lawn on Fitzhugh (the location later became a bank and may be all townhomes now)  and had a large LGB presence (in a conservative company) because of its location near the “crossroads” at Cedar Springs. When I was there, only one employee that I know of developed HIV (and died).  The executive offices were located at Northpoint on I-635 and 175, and ADR (which supported Datacomm DB and DC) was near that location (for training classes), but also near EDS.  

  

This was actually a good time in my life, so if someone at Experian finds this post, I hope this sits well with them.

However, “Economic Invincibility” does not like Experian’s version of customer service (although this video is 3 years old).

  

   

I really wonder what the three major credit reporting companies think about the concept of "social credit systems" which are developing in China and which tech companies seem to be doing underground to regulate who has a right to be on their platforms.
 
I spent some of my last summer in Minnesota working for RMA in 2003 as a debt collector, and I recall one person I called, with just a small $60 balance, ask if I would pay for it for him personally because I was “better off”.  Wokeness had already started in 2003.