H&amp;R Block gave me someone else&#39;s personal info by mistake. What do I do? I needed to amend my 2013 tax return so I went to H&amp;R Block, my first mistake. A few weeks later I went back to the H&amp;R block office to pick up my amended return and other supporting documents. It seems like all my information is present and correct but I haven't verified this. However, I noticed a 1099 form that looked unfamiliar. Upon closer inspection, it was the 1099 of a different H&amp;R Block customer that included the person's name, address, social security number, and other tax related info. I looked up the person's full name on Facebook and based on the info in his profile I'm 99% certain I found the right guy. So far I have escalated the issue with H&amp;R Block but it will take 7-10 business days for them to email me back. I can't go back to the physical location since it's closed for over a week. I'm keeping the form safe in my apartment for now. I live in San Francisco, CA. Since I'm now in possession of this person's personal info do I have to take any special action to avoid any legal trouble? Does this person have grounds to sue H&amp;R Block since they compromised his info? Is reaching out to this guy on Facebook so we can talk in-person the right thing to do? If he wants to sue H&amp;R Block I want to help him do that. I could ask him for his address to verify that it's actually him. Should I shred this person's 1099 form immediately or hold on to it incase he wants to sue H&amp;R Block? Do I have grounds to sue H&amp;R Block? For all I know our info was swapped and this guy now has my 1099 form. Am I legally allowed to take photographs of this person's 1099 form as proof that H&amp;R Block put it in my possession?
First of all, the USA's legal system is not here to be referee to every single little "gotcha" mistake, and every little mistake doesn't mean a payday for someone. The employee at the tax preparer screwed up. They mixed up your folder with the other guy's folder. It was an honest mistake, which is another way of saying "nobody stands to gain from this." The best LEGAL action you can take is to either destroy the copy in your possession, or mail it back to the tax preparer, and call it a good day, done well. The law of torts exists to adjudicate sincere and structural divergences of interests, not to fix silly mistakes. As a point of law, what was the damage of this "event?" Some random person (you) saw a 1099 belonging to someone else. In good faith, you attempt to find and reinstate the rightful owner with their document. All good. As it is, you have zero "standing" in a case of inadvertent clerical error between two other parties.
I do not have the phone number, email, or anything else associated with the account. Well, neither do I - so it must be my account. Unfortunately, the fact that you appear in most or all of the pictures on that account does not prove that you own it. It could be the photographer's account. Do I have ANY options here Can you reactivate the email account associated with the Twitter account? Or the phone number? Either would allow you to reset the password and access the account. You can go to court (in California) and seek an injunction ordering Twitter to delete the photos or give you access. Of course, you have the same issues proving ownership here as you did with Twitter but the court may have different priorities (justice) than Twitter does (corporate protection). I had an idea. If you (or your husband) own the copyright in the photos (i.e. one of you was the photographer) you could issue a DCMA take-down notice because the poster (who, according to Twitter, isn’t you) does not have permission (even if they did at the time: permission can be revoked). Twitter would be unable to contact the account holder and would be required to remove the images when they got no response.of course, if the photographer was someone else, they could do it. Or you could break the law and say it was you, although I would never recommend this even with a near zero chance of being caught.
If you don't respond to the letter, you will be penalized. So why would they send you a pre-stamped envelope? Paying for communications is just part of your everyday life and shouldn't come out of tax payers' money.
You call their employer and impersonate them The onus is on the employer to keep your personal data secure. If they do not take reasonable steps to verify that the caller is indeed you, they fail that duty and can be held to account. So, not a loophole.
What would be the most reasonable thing to do? Live with it. Oh, and stop breaking the law with your automated emails. Illegality on their part does not justify illegality on your part. Also, it’s likely that this activity has caused your email address to be blocked automatically which may explain why they aren’t contacting you. From a legal point of view, that’s the only reasonable option. You do have valid grounds for a lawsuit for the value of the watermelon but the cost of filing will be a couple of orders of magnitude greater than the value of the melon so doing so isn’t “reasonable”. If you want to vent, the internet offers a wide variety of social media platforms for which that seems to be their primary focus. But that’s got nothing to do with the law.
It's from a company called MarkMonitor that does trademark protection for clients - specifically around internet activities and that includes domain cybersquatting - which is illegal in the US under the ACPA, and of course that's what you were/are doing. So it could be a legitimate request as these things go. But that's not the whole story - the domain in the e-mail you posted is &quot;walmartt.com&quot; which is not only currently owned by Walmart Inc. but always has been, in fact the current Registrar of record is the aforementioned MarkMonitor. So either this isn't a legitimate request because you don't own &quot;walmartt.com&quot; and therefore this is spam or phishing (in which case feel free to delete it and move on with your life), granted that would be a pretty impressive bit of phishing since you are currently cybersquatting some Walmart-typo domains. Or you're just telling porkies all the way through your question for reasons of your own.
No, there is no general publicly accessible directory of lawsuits against private individuals, even if it concerns yourself. The complaint must identify you as the defendant indicating a ladungsfähige Anschrift, § 253 Ⅱ, Ⅳ, 130 ZPO. Commencing an action requires service of process, § 253 Ⅰ ZPO. I presume you are not a De-Mail user. So you will get a hardcopy. You may not know that, but such mail in Germany is usually sent in yellow envelopes. The mailman will carefully compare the mailbox label and in case of a match record the date and time of successful delivery on the envelope as well as a slip of paper returned to the sender, the court in this case. Now this will obviously fail in your case (unless the landlord maliciously attached a corresponding label to a mailbox). In a civil action the court “pretends” to be dumb regarding facts. The landlord must try to track you down. Evidently he knew your email address, so he had some contact details. If he was evil, the next option would be to ask the court for an öffentliche Zustellung, § 185 ZPO. If the court agreed, this means there will be, for instance, in the city hall a paper on a bulletin board “To the attention of Coala, last known address …: There is mail for you to pick up at my office.” Two weeks later the letter is automatically considered to be delivered.Some cities (example: Cologne, NRW) also publish these documents on the internet, but due to GDPR considerations delete them after a certain period now. If there was a lawsuit, there will have been a default judgment by now, i.e. you will have lost just by being a no‑show. However, you said you have never received the bill. This means the landlord must have produced false evidence, claim to have sent the bill and a subsequent warning notice, but there was none. But this is an entirely different issue.
We don't want this issue to adversely affect our credit and got legal consulting which suggested we should pay the debt collector to protect our credit score, and then sue the landlord for the money back in small claims court. I'm a little worried about this strategy since it requires to hand away the money first, and am trying to get second opinions. The debt collector is probably either the owner of the claim against you, if it is an assignee of the claim, or an agent of the landlord for purposes of collection. Thus, payment to the debt collector is equivalent to payment of the landlord. The law varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction regarding whether payment constitutes of waiver of a right to sue over the debt. Sometimes it is necessary to designate the payment "under protests" or "reserving all rights", but that is not a uniform rule of law that applies in all jurisdictions, and I do not have the time and familiarity with that state's law to research Massachusetts case law on that point accurately.