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Cringely on Identity Theft
Boiled Frog writes "Prompted by the theft of his mail, Cringely investigates how easy it is to steal identities from government publications. In this article he explains how he got the identities of 300,000 people which he calculates to be valued at $65 billion dollars. If Cringely can do it, anyone can."
I think it's refering to the $65 billion dollars. If you've put in a dollar sign, you don't need the word dollar after it.
I drank what? -- Socrates
D'oh! I get it now!!! $65 Billion or 65 Billion Dollars, not $65 Billion Dollars (65 billion dollars dollars).
Ok, I am insane now.
666-607: 6th floor apartment of the beast
Never work for an employer that demands your Social Security number;
Um, how are you going to do that, exactly? Employers are required to have your SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER, guess why? So they can pay your SOCIAL SECURITY TAX.
Use a fake one? Sure, as long as you don't mind that you're never going to be able to collect social security. Also I'd be very surprised if it wasn't a federal offense to falsify an SSN on SSA/tax forms.
If you work your whole life getting paid in cash under the table, that's fine. But in that case, identity theft probably isn't an issue for you, since you don't have any money in banks, don't have insurance, don't drive a car (legally anyway) etc.
It might be something about the SF Bay area. No, really -- I've lived in three different places (metro Detroit, DFW, and Cali) and the mail-mishaps-per-year number has been way higher in California, so bad that the local congressperson (Anna Eshoo?) actually got involved at one point.
How in the world does using a PO box protect you from identity theft? They can't steal your incoming mail? Not to worry, the post office will probably put it in the wrong box. Happened to me on a bi-weekly basis.
You're protecting your address? If someone finds your SSN, they can easily obtain your address. Since your PO box is probably in the same zipcode you live in (it is the closes post office, right?), they'll have the zipcode correct when trying to do a search.
If you use your PO box as your address for everything, then what are you protecting? Won't everything (credit cards, credit bureaus) be updated to use the PO box? Its just data sitting in an address field? How does the prefix 'PO Box' protect you?