Asif Zamir

Hi!

My name is Asif Zamir, I run a small business consulting firm, currently a one man show but on some projects I work with other consultants and in the past I have had other employees with me. I’ve been doing this for a number of years and its enjoyable most days. I help with business plans, start up plans, marketing plans, business wind down, website consulting (and formerly design) and mediation projects. My goal is to help small businesses start, grow and succeed.

My other business interests include photography equipment, venture capital and private equity, stocks / options, income properties and investment-grade land.

Some years are successful and some years are not, I’ve participated in both successful projects and unfortunately failed projects.

Identity Theft:

In 2006 it was brought to my attention that my driver’s license, social insurance number and credit card may have been duplicated and / or comprised. I had heard that this was a common problem and that nothing much could come of it.

Unfortunately I acted very slowly and clumsily, thinking that this small, insignificant problem would take care of itself. Over the course of a few months I learned that this may be a situation of full blown identity theft.

At first the losses were fairly small and I had no problem bearing the financial burden, also I was arrogant, thinking I could simply handle the losses which were only a few thousand dollars at the time. As the losses increased over a period of months, my cash was completely depleted and I had to liquidate capital assets including my car, furnishings, private equities etc.

As the situation worsened I had to dip into my business cash and went into deep debt, a problem for me because I already had legitimate debts and liabilities that I still owed on.

During one such incident, a collection agency called me regarding a credit card in my name with up to $20,000 of debt owing, demanding immediate payment. One major credit bureau had on record a mortgage in default. It took over 9+ months to dispute and remove those items from my credit file however tremendous lasting damage had occurred during the time. If you haven’t checked your credit file(s) lately, you should do it soon!

I spoke with a bankruptcy lawyer and was advised that a bankruptcy would simply wipe out a majority of my debts and let me focus on more important matters. I thought about it and prayed about it and decided it was not a suitable proposition at the time, because it wouldn’t be fair to many of the people I legitimately owe.

In regard to this specific situation, my records show losses (including lost income, capital write downs and write offs) of $380,000 – to $400,000 however I’ve been told that an official audit may only verify losses of $260,000 - $325,000 respectively. We won’t know exactly how much for some time and either way, it’s a lot of money.

Last year on the bus a lady came up to me, out of the blue and told me of how identity theft caused her to lose her home, most of her possessions and money, her losses were much greater than mine (financially speaking). It was an interesting conversation because I had never met her before and she didn’t know that I was suffering a similar situation.

Related Circumstances:

- As angry individual creditors tried ruining my reputation, other legitimate debtors refused to pay me on time or in full, using the situation to their advantage, thus slowing progress down for me and everyone I owe.

- One angry person caused further damage to my small business by phoning and filling up my voicemail (which holds 40 messages) with blank messages, thus not allowing legitimate clients to leave messages, causing larger business losses for me and slowing down progress. This continued for weeks.

A situation that should have taken just a few months to resolve is turning out to take years.

EBay / Camera Store

Authorities say this is possibly just a coincidence and having little to nothing to do with my identity theft. My eBay account including email address was taken over. I had a thriving high end camera and camera equipment business which I mostly ran out of my home, but I also started selling on eBay because it’s faster, cheaper and easier. I should mention, photography is a personal hobby of mine, although not so much lately.

Any way, according to authorities, I may have clicked on a bad link in a spam email.

EBay has provided information regarding malicious emails:

http://pages.ebay.com/securitycenter/stop_spoof_websites.html

Here is another link provided by EBay regarding identity theft.

http://pages.ebay.com/securitycenter/deterring_identity_theft.html

Apparently this is becoming a widespread problem.

I quickly contacted EBay via live chat and alerted them that my account may have been compromised. EBay was way ahead of me and just a few minutes later suspended my account for everyone’s safety.

Here’s my EBay ID: Comebackking05

You can view my feedback here: http://feedback.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewFeedback2&userid=comebackking05&&ftab=FeedbackAsSeller&iid=170306810945&sspagename=VIP:feedback:2:us

As you can see, I had positive feedback up to a point, then negative feedback started rolling in, and eventually the suspension of my account. My feedback went from 100%, to 93% on the day of suspension. (It's now marked as zero since the account has been suspended).

At the time I had about 410 regular camera customers. I emailed everyone, 370 of them were not affected by the situation and completely happy.

On the side were 18-20 people I had never heard of or received money from who had filed a complaint that they had sent money to me outside of eBay and had not received their order. Some of the orders weren’t even for camera equipment. It took about 6 months to investigate and conclude that although they may have sent someone money, it wasn’t sent to me or received by me and had nothing to do with me. After some time they were satisfied. At first some had actually received refunds that they didn’t deserve, caused a lot of trouble and I doubt they will be returning the funds or camera equipment to me. What a waste of time and resources!

That left about 40 legitimate customers who had sent money and were affected by the situation, still waiting for camera equipment promised to them or a refund. Some are still waiting (some patiently, some angrily) and I'm refunding them one by one, slowly.

From then till now I’ve been refunding one by one, as my cash position permits, dipping into my consulting income and of course liquidating the purchased camera equipment at below wholesale since specialized equipment is hard to sell, especially if your name has been tarnished within the close-knit high end camera community, which mine has.

If you have been personally affected or are still not in receipt of your camera or equipment or a pending refund, please call or email me. I’d like to get you’re money to you plus compensate you for the problem. It will take time and it will not be quickly resolved, and I most likely already have your name on a list of pending transactions. But you should still contact me to verify.

My plan to open a camera store in Scarborough or Downtown Toronto has been delayed until further notice, I would estimate March 2010 at the very earliest, but I won’t be running the day to day operations.

Final Thoughts:

Protect your identity! Here are some tips I received from various sources over the last few months:

1.) Do not give out your driver’s license or social insurance number unless it’s absolutely necessary. You never know when paperwork will get into the hands of malicious people or professional identity thieves. As a small business consultant I’m constantly in the position of verifying my identity (especially when dealing with sensitive company information) and this can become a complicated situation.

2.) Don’t answer telephone surveys that ask too specific information. Again, I probably had telemarketers and phone survey people calling me at least once a month. When you run a small business you’ll end up on a lot of mailing and calling lists.

3.) Be careful of what links you click on in email. If the email looks suspicious, that should raise a red flag. Almost every popular website that holds personal information now has links regarding email security.

4.) Monitor your credit report at least once every 3 months. Most credit bureaus allow you to subscribe to a special service where they will contact you if a drastic change has been made to your file. Although it is natural for mistakes to show up once in a while, being vigilant will protect you in the long run, and don’t sweat the small mistakes, they will be corrected (although not necessarily quickly).

I’ve setup this blog to aid in the completion of this situation and will update occasionally, and will continue to post here as I continue to make progress.

I’ve mentioned to my supporters a few times that the hardest part of this is knowing that a lot of money went to waste, when I had (and still have) real debts I could have been paying off.

I have received a number of emails and phone calls of support, even from people I owe (Thank you so much!) and of course a number of angry emails and phone calls, which is to be expected.

Things are getting better now and we'll get through this, thanks again to my supporters!

Thanks again!

Asif Zamir

647-669-0212 (cell phone)
asif.zamir@yahoo.com

Dry cleaning

I was hoping to get my pants dry cleaned today so I drove over to the mall. While looking for the dry cleaners I noticed a calling card booth near the foodcourt that offered unlimited daytime minutes for your cell phone for $15 per month. When I stopped to ask the gentleman working there for some more information, he just pointed at the poster and walked away. Seems like he doesn't understand it either.

Earlier this evening I went to get a meatball sub, and I noticed a man in a wheelchair trying to go up a hill with a lap-full of groceries. He couldn't make it in his manual wheelchair because he was probably very tired. So I ran over to him just as he gave up and started going backwards down the hill! Anyway I got to him just in time. I realized while I was frantically running towards him that I'm not nearly as fit as I used to be. Lol. Time to get back in shape!

The last time I was here was 1997 on a work project and before that 1992. The town sure has changed since then. It seems like everyone is developing real estate here. I was just telling my old friend about the last time we were here, good times!

No laughing matter

Last year I was watching a comedian on TV talk about having his identity stolen. Someone had used his name to get credit cards, utilities and services totalling almost $90,000. And what was more incredible was he was partially liable and ended up paying most of it. He made such a huge laugh out of the whole thing though.

What I would soon realize is that my own identity would be stolen and it would be no laughing matter. So far I've lost an email account, Ebay account, had a credit card taken in my name and a cell phone taken in my name. There's a bit more to it than that, but that's as much as I'd like to explain right now. I've actually had to use my own money to pay debts that aren't mine, which takes away from my real debts that need to be paid.

I'm sure someone is laughing about this whole thing, but not me.

Welcome to my blog. I wanted a place to post my random comments and photos / stories from missions projects I've been a part of so stay tuned, I'll be updating whenever I can.