Accidentally shared sensitive info to a stranger

Hello Everyone,

Couldn't find any similar topic in the forum.

I am selling a vehicle in Facebook marketplace and a person asked for the registration document. I edit the document picture so no sensitive info is visible and proceed to select the picture to send it.

Here is when it all went wrong.

My phone decides to send a different picture to him which happened to be a photo of the first page of the tax declaration papers I received (which I had to send to my accountant the same day)

The issue now is that this person has all my personal info including my login details to the tax website, my AHV and my address.

It is more unfortunate, that this week I was looking at which law insurance to take so I am currently uninsured for legal advice.

Has anyone any idea what is the worst case scenario?

And if I should take immediate action?

By the way, His profile looks legit and not scam-like. I told him to delete the photo and he said ok, but you can never be sure.

Worst case scenario: he successfully steals your identity and lands you in penury. This is extremely unlikely. There are over 8 million people in Switzerland. The vast majority are not interested in stealing your identify. You really have very little to worry about it. The information shared is not that sensitive.

You've already taken the immediate action you need to take - contacted him and asked him to delete the photo.

What else could you do? The police won't be interested. No crime has been committed. I suppose you could just about possibly get a court order to demand that the potential buyer demonstrates they've deleted the information - but it would take enormous expense and time.

They don't have all your personal info. The information you have is private, but not secret. They don't have your password. Unless you stupidly wrote in on the first page of your tax return. In which case change it immediately.

Hey @NotAllThere,

sorry for the late reply.

Finally, nothing happened.

But thanks a lot for your response

Tax webseite in Zürich requires additional confirmation by SMS to be able to log in.

Where it should offer something like this instead of SMS, but SMS is better then nothing

https://www.swissid.ch/en/geschaefts…n-loesung.html

It also offers MobileID which I use to login.

If you sent via Whatsapp, I believe that if you block a person, it automatically deletes all media shared from BOTH phones. If he has created a copy of the photo already, or you shared via a different app that won't help you.

In any case, I'd tend to agree that you just talk to the person, and ask them nicely. Most probably you're OK.

Contact the website, tell them what happened, ask for a new Zugangscode.

be careful, 25 years ago I did share personal info with a women, I said "I love you". I am still l am with her now