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It wasn’t until August 2012, when the fraudster started skipping payments on the credit card and the mortgage, that Buzanic says she started getting 12 to 14 calls a day at home from the bank’s bill collectors.

“I can’t begin to explain to you, because I get so angry and nervous, about how many times a day they called me, “ she says. “I lost 45 pounds in less than three months. I’ve never seen a bank with such gangster tactics, honest to God.”

Buzanic’s identity theft and mortgage-fraud story is all too familiar to Jennifer Fiddian-Green, a Toronto forensic accountant who went through the same thing in 2006.

She was sitting at her desk in her downtown Toronto office when she answered the phone, only to hear an aggressive collector on the other end, demanding payment on a mortgage she didn’t know existed.

“I said, ‘Who the hell are you and what are you talking about?” Fiddian-Green recalls.

Unlike Buzanic, who works in sales, Fiddian-Green investigates fraud for a living and is an anti-money laundering specialist. She immediately called the bank, and started following the paper trail to discover not one, but two mortgages in her name, at two separate financial institutions, totalling more than $500,000 on a property purchased in her name in Brantford, Ont.

“When the collector told me he found me in 10 seconds, I asked the bank why they didn’t Google me before they loaned the money. I really challenged the company.”

Fiddian-Green, a partner with Grant Thornton LLP, an accounting and business advisory firm, still has no idea how identity thieves got her personal information, but they had her name, Social Insurance Number, two to three years of fake tax returns, and a fake citizenship card.