Fort Myers police say a man used other people's personal information to apply for car financing, and the thing that stopped it was a dealership employee looking closely at an ID rather than anything in the credit system

Fort Myers police say a man applied for vehicle financing using other people's personal information, and that the people whose names were used found out when notices arrived about applications they had never made. The case was reported by Austin Schargorodski at WINK News.

Police say Johnathan Andrew Decker, 41, faces two counts of fraud-impersonation. Detectives arrested him on August 7, executing a search warrant at an apartment on Waterbury Court with assistance from the Lee County Sheriff's Office.

According to WINK News, police say two victims discovered their personally identifiable information had been used without their consent to seek vehicle financing. Both received notices that applications had been submitted in their names, though neither had applied for the financing nor agreed to serve as a co-signer.

The attempt ran through a dealership in the Tampa area. Detectives say employees there noticed discrepancies in the identification presented during the transaction, and that their attention to it is what kept the vehicle from being delivered. As detectives developed the case, police say additional victims were identified.

How many, and for how much, is not on the record. Police have not released a total, a dollar figure or a court date, and none is supplied here.

What the case shows a reader is where the check actually happened. The applications went in and were processed far enough to generate notices to the people named on them. What stopped the car leaving the lot was an employee looking closely at an ID. The people whose names were used learned about it afterwards, from the paperwork, rather than from anything that blocked it in advance.

That makes the notice the thing to act on. Anyone who receives word of a credit application they did not make can place a security freeze with each of the three national credit bureaus, which is free under federal law and can be lifted temporarily when they genuinely want to borrow. It is the step that stops an application from being approved rather than merely recording that one was made.

This item rests on a single outlet's reporting, which is worth stating rather than leaving for the reader to work out. The Fort Myers Police Department publishes no release on this case in its public newsroom, the Lee County Sheriff's Office public booking record did not respond when this desk queried it, and no second outlet has carried the story. Everything above is attributed to Fort Myers police through WINK News.

Decker is charged. He has not been tried and he has not been convicted, and everything police say about what he did is an allegation until a court finds otherwise. Nothing has been published anywhere this desk could reach about how he answers it, and no reader should draw any inference at all from that silence.