Anyone's address in the FAA's Airman Database ever change spontaneously?

[waveoff]

So I was looking up some fellow pilots' addresses so I could send Christmas cards out and I decided to check my pilot record to see if my latest medical was entered into the database yet. The first thing I notice is that my address is different. I'm like, "WTF"? I live in PA and it shows my address as being in FL. So I do a little googling on my "new" address and it turns up as a business address in FL. I decide to dig a little deeper and query all FAA certificates in that particular town where I supposedly live now. Out of the 208 records that were returned in the search, there's ONE address that is very close to "my" address. I googled the name that appears on the similar address and it turned up some other interesting information. I was wondering why I hadn't been getting any junk mail from the FAA for the past couple of months...

Has this ever happened to anyone else? Your address just spontaneously changing?

I called the FAA's Airman Certification branch in Oklahoma City and talked to someone to see if I could get some answers as to how this happened. The gentleman I spoke with said that his records show that the address change occurred on October 2, 2007. He said that his computer didn't show how this occurred though. You'd think that a record of an address change would exist and it would show whether the change request was submitted via internet or via mail. Evidently, their current record keeping system doesn't do that. So that brings me to what's bugging me. In order to request an address change you have to know some pretty personal information. Like the kind of information that someone might use to steal you identity. Maybe I'm being paranoid but how the hell does my address just change out of the blue? I've typed up an e-mail that I plan on submitting to the Office of the Inspector General for the Department of Transportation to see if they can get to the bottom of this. I was also going to send the same e-mail to the fraud unit of the sheriff's department in the town where my "new" address is. The e-mail contains all of the info I came across while googling for info. Whether it's pertinent or not, I don't know...hopefully they can find something out for me. I got a copy of my credit report and didn't notice any strange activity so that's good.

Does anyone have any ideas as to what might have happened? Is there anything I should do aside from what I've already done? The guy I spoke to at the FAA said that I can just go and change my address back to what it should be. The problem with that is, it doesn't explain why my address was changed in the first place! I want to know how and why it happened!

 

[DrewBlows]

If the system requires manual data entry, it may be simple human error. Some bureaucrat probably clicked the wrong line and entered someone else's information in your file.

I doubt someone stole your identity and changed your address with the FAA. I was a victim of identity theft several years back. I didn't have any money stolen from me, but the thief used my account to open an account to transfer stolen funds into. Fortunately he was caught and my credit wasn't affected. If you are concerned about identity theft (everyone should be), check your credit history on a fairly regular basis.

www.freecreditreport.com