Identity theft, isn't it romantic?

Ok, this is just so creepy I had to share. My husband had his credit card number stolen last week and some random dude bought a subscription to Playboy, some DirectTv porn and other things that (thankfully) don't fit my husband's typical spending patterns. So, the little fraud alert bell went off at the credit card company and they called my husband to see if he made these purchases.

Just to give you some background, I'm totally paranoid about identity theft because I've read all the horror stories about not being able to buy houses or cars because some jackass has buried you in $25,000 of credit card debt. Anyways, I've been busy obsessing about whether our house is going to go into foreclosure because someone took out a sub-prime mortgage on a condo in Fort Lauderdale, and then today we received flowers.

Correction, my husband received flowers. The note was somewhat mysterious, saying only "IUY." I've googled it, tried to decode it, would love to hear any theories on what this might mean. At first I thought my husband's girlfriend was sending him coded messages, but then he reminded me (somewhat defensively, I might add) that his credit card had recently been stolen. Cue complete paranoia. I was on the phone with the FTD.com faster than you can say "bankruptcy" only to find that they have some useless confidentiality clause (I mean who are they protecting here? Secret admirers?) and they could not disclose the sender. Finally, I ended up checking the stolen credit card and there it was a $41.99 charge on FTD.com for our cheap-ass flowers.

So, to be clear, our identity thief sent us flowers. Did he do this to thank us for the porn? To soften the blow of having someone steal our credit card? To taunt us? Isn't this totally bizarre? I think Stacey has the best theory I've heard so far, perhaps the thief meant to write IOU on the card instead of IUY. Not bad, Stace...

The funniest part of this entire situation is that in Ken's world, buying flowers is so unusual that it actually sets off fraud alerts. Classic.