Comments on: How to handle ID fraud's youngest victims

For one thing, you shouldn't enroll your child for credit monitoring, ID fraud experts say.

[Imalittleteapot]

We already know there have been many suggestions on how to stop ID theft and nobody ever implements them.

Banks, credit card companies, and the government have refused time and time again to implement changes that could actually protect against identity theft like creating a national database that links your SSN to your local bank branch and anytime you open a new account, whoever is opening that account with you, would have to call and get verbal, signed, and faxed authorization from your bank that is listed in the database that you have in fact when down to your local branch, authenticated your identity with people you know, and authorized the account such as opening a new credit card account. I should have to go down to my own local branch and prove my identity and authorize that the credit card company is indeed allowed to open an account in my name with my SSN. This would stop a thief from opening an account in my name from a thousand miles away.

We should also stop using SSNs for identity and if we continue to do so we should at least make it a one phone call procedure to receive a new SSN number with your old credit report moved over to it with all the fraudulent accounts taken off.

We should be using smart cards with public, private key technology where the private key never leaves the device. Even the bank employees shouldn't know the private key so a bank employee can't steal your private key. They should only have access to the public key and if it does get hacked you can easily just get a new smart card and the old one can become deactivated. Biometrics cannot be deactivated. What have they done instead? They've given us credit cards where the secret number is plastered on the front of it where any store clerk can read it. Their solution? RFID so now someone can read your credit card number with what basically amounts to a radio even if you never take it out of your wallet. How is that solving the problem? That's making it worse and they don't even care.

However, nobody has done anything to protect us from identity theft because they don't want people to have control over their credit information. We should just stop using it. If you want to loan someone money then don't even look at their stupid credit report. It means nothing. Have no faith in those reports. Businesses need to start coming up with their own ways to decide if they want to loan someone money based on if they know you or they trust you. We either need to reform the way credit scores work or we need a law that says companies can't put bad marks on your credit report anymore because the government and banks haven't even provided us with a secure way of knowing if the credit report you're looking at really belongs to the person that didn't pay you back or not. It's a system built around fraud and there's not way to tell if a credit report means anything or not. So, lets just stop using them entirely until someone in the government comes around and implements some real solutions.

[Lerianis]

All of these ways that you are mentioning to fix things are way too hard to implement. Really, the solution is for the credit card companies to ask for MOUNDS of information before they extend credit, and to stop sending out those STUPID pre-approved offers to people.
I found a way to opt out of all those things FOREVER online. I forget what it was, but it was a simple phone number you call, give them your name and address (nothing else) and you are put on a blacklist for those offers. I did it for myself and have YET to see another pre-approved offer come to my home.

[Imalittleteapot]

Lerianis: These things aren't too hard. We already have credit cards, but we can't give people smart credit cards? Yeah it would take time, but they haven't even started and we could have been done by now.

Also, every bank already keeps national databases already. Look at your actual credit score. So, you're telling me they have a national database that links everyone's credit score to their SS number, but they can't add a couple more fields to same friggin database to keep track of what my actual address is plus the address of my local bank branch is? That's just crap.

Look, when I stick my credit card in any register in the country at any Walmart or any other store it can call up a database and see if I have money left in my account right? How come a teenage girl working at the counter of Walmart on the other side of the country can dial into a database to tell if I have money or not, but say a company like Capital One can't dial into a national database to see what my local bank branch is when I order a new smart card?

Then they could just mail the smart card down to my bank branch instead of to my house. Then I go down to the bank and pay a small fee, say 5 or 10 dollars for my local branch to auth my identity and activate my account for me. Banks could compete with each other based on who had the lowest fees.

Look, it's even profitable for the banks to do this. They could charge small fees like 5 or 10 dollars to do this for people and keep people's identity safer. Look, I just activated a new credit card account. They don't even ask you for your friggin mother's maiden name anymore sometimes. These criminals can open accounts with just your SSN which is plastered on every job form you ever filled out and everything else they ask for is pretty much publicly accessible. They can do it over a pre-paid cell phone and have the bill mailed to whatever address they want. They even asked me where I wanted the bill sent if I wanted it sent to a different address then where I live when I activated it over the phone where there was no way they could tell if I was really me.

This happened to my friend. He had his credit locked and everything and some credit card company (WAMU providian actually) still gave someone else a credit card in his name. The criminal had it sent to a completely different address from where my friend actually lived. My friend didn't find out for for months until collections started calling, but did it hurt his credit since he had it frozen I don't know, but a criminal still got some free money. If it's too hard to make sure people really are who they say they are then we shouldn't be issuing credit cards anymore at all.

Now, you say all this is too hard, but give me one good reason why it is too hard? We already ship people credit cards, we've already invented smart cards, and we already have national databases that can be checked by any teenager working a cash register. We have the technology now to do these things. Also, the fact that it's my credit means I should have some control over it. If they think it is too difficult then that's just tough titty. If the government came in and said that's how it had to be done then trust me they would find a way to make it happen.

[The_Decider]

Nothing you posted will stop identity theft. Smart cards and biometrics can be spoofed, you can work with people on the inside.

The only thing that will happen if they implement this nonsense is a loss of privacy.

[Imalittleteapot]

The_Decider:
It is true that smart cards can be spoofed and so can credit cards, but it's much harder. Consider this. Nobody knows my private key. Not even the bank. It's not like a credit card where a copy of the number is made every place you use it. Only the factory that makes it could possibly know. The bank doesn't need my private key to auth a transaction. All they need to do is decrypt with the public key to know a transaction has indeed been signed with my private key. Remember, that's why I said even the bank shouldn't know what the private key is so a bank employee can't steal it. So, if a lot of spoofed cards start showing up we know it's probably someone that works at the factory. That narrows the list down.

Also, the people at the factory don't know my smart card's pin number. Why? because the pin number isn't set until the smart card leaves the factory. Only when I activate the account at my local bank branch do I type a pin number into the machine to set what I want my pin number to be. Remember, the pin number doesn't need to be stored on the device. It only needs to be store on the authorization server. So, now maybe my local bank branch knows my pin number, bu they still don't know my private key.

Also, the authorization server isn't in the same place as the factory that makes the cards. A smart card factory employee is probably not going to be working in the same building where the authorization server is. So, he would have to hack into that to get my pin number because my pin number wasn't set until long after the smart card left the factory.

Then, even if they could get my pin number I just call up and say the card was stolen and I get a new one and the old one gets deactivated. That's a lot of work to steal a smart card that only works two days and then you get arrested because the cops know it was probably someone at the factory since they had your private key.

However, what it would do is stop professional ID gangs from openening as many accounts as they do now because for every account they open they have to go to a different bank. So, they'd have to travel all over the country to different banks to get these cards activated plus pay a fee everytime they activate a card. Plus since they have to activate it at my bank I can go down to my bank at anytime and see what accounts have been opened in my name.

Now, it is true that they may find a way of activating it without going down to my bank branch by working with someone on the inside. However, if the credit card company doesn't have my faxed signature on a form that came from my banck branch's computer then obviously it wasn't me that opened the account and so I'm not responsible for it am I? No, it would not stop it, but it would make it harder.

[sparrowhyperion]

I think the whole credit reporting industry needs to be completely rebuilt. Right now the system is great for Banks and other lenders, but consumers have to jump through 100 hoops to get repairs completed, and they need to do it 3 or 4 times. There needs to be ONE credit bureau, and it needs to be monitored heavily by the Fed. And the entire process of repairing errors needs to be simplified. They should also simply not allow Social Security numbers to be issued for children until they are either 16 with a parent's permission or 18.

[Lerianis]

True. Really, you should only have to call ONCE to get a fraudulent thing taken off your account or report. Speaking from talking with others who have had THEIR credit stolen... it's much harder than that, even though the law says that is all you should have to do, call them up, tell them you did NOT open the account, swear to a deposition that you didn't, and they move on.

[Identity_Theft_Expert]

The only thing you can do wrong, is nothing. You have to actively monitoring your childs SSN. If applying for fraud alerts every 90 days instigates a credit report on a minor then so-be-it. Then place a credit freeze. Which should already be right, but its not due to lobby's set up by the bureaus. Broad sweeps of public data is great, but will only warn you. You still need a freeze. www.IDTheftSecurity.com