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SSN Overlap With Micronesia Causes Trouble For Woman
stevel writes "Holly Ramer, who lives in Concord, NH, has never been to the Federated States of Micronesia, but debt collectors dun her mercilessly for unpaid loans taken out by a small business owner in that Pacific island nation. Why? Micronesia and other countries in the region have their own Social Security Administrations which gave out numbers to residents applying for US disaster relief loans. The catch is that the Micronesian SSNs have fewer digits than the nine-digit US version, and when credit bureaus entered these into their database, they padded them out with zeros on the front. These numbers then matched innocent US citizens with SSNs beginning with zeroes, as many in northern New England do. The credit bureaus say to call the Social Security Administration, the SSA says call the credit bureaus, the FTC says they can't help, and nobody is taking responsibility for the confusion."
And when they keep calling you at your job, and insist on speaking to your boss, and call your family, and eventually physically show up at your door, what then?
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Fuck you! i do not owe you any money so you sort it out, it is not my problem
Actually if you wanted to be a real dick you could sue the collection agencies rather easily and collect at least $1,000 per violation. I would recommend that the people who are receiving these calls read up on the 'Fair Debt Collection Practices Act'. Send a cease and desist order to the debt collector as provided for by the FDCPA and when they call you again file suit. Wait a few months and cash your check.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
I'd live for that day.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
And when they keep calling you at your job, and insist on speaking to your boss, and call your family, and eventually physically show up at your door, what then?
Then you send them a cease and desist order as provided for by the FDCPA (fair debt collection practices act). If they are stupid enough to continue collection efforts after receiving it then you file suit against them in Federal court and collect $1,000 for each violation. They'll soon stop calling you when they realize that each phone call is going to cost them a thousand bucks.
What debt collector shows up at your door anyways? I've never heard of that. If they had the balls to try that with me I'd ask them once nicely to get off my property and if they declined I would "encourage" them to leave with more forceful measures.
Remember that a debt collector has no power or authority over you. Their main weapon is intimidation. They are counting on scaring you into paying them money and will use all manner of threats and lies to achieve this end. Other than that their only possible remedy is to sue you. This is an empty threat for the most part though because they almost always lack the documentation that would be required to win a lawsuit. They bank on collecting default judgments when the defendants fail to appear and aren't prepared to deal with someone shows up and contests the matter.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
That really can be effective. My household kept receiving calls from one collection agency that had our phone number (nothing to do with SSNs, identity theft, etc., but still annoying, especially since it was usually an automated call). For whatever reason, they kept calling even after we told them that the person they were looking for no longer used our number. So, I mailed off a FDCPA Sec. 805(c) demand that they cease communication with us.
The next time they called (with a real person fortunately for them), I pointed out that I had sent a written demand that they stop calling and that their call was in violation of the FDCPA. I didn't have to be mean...the calls stopped cold.
Instead of insulting a poor call-center rep, if a collection agency is trying to charge for a debt that's not yours, you need to do the following. (note: this only applies if you are in the USA)
1- Ask their address. They are legally obligated to give it to you.
2- Write a letter to them, invoking the Fair Collection Practices Act and demanding that they cease collections
3- If they can't prove the debt is yours, they must cease collecting and inform the credit bureaus of this.
4- There is no four
No sig for the moment.
Brandishing a firearm on your own property when someone refuses to leave = defense of property in almost every state in the Union.
Let us live so that when we come to die, even the undertaker will be sorry -- Mark Twain
File suit? Oh yeah, that'll cost you less than $1k... : /
A 1k judgement falls under small claims court. That doesn't require a lawyer and it's cheap as hell in terms of fees.
Well, if it were possible to get legislation that puts credit bureaus acting within the U.S. under the domain of the FTC
Yeah, if only there was legislation in place that did that. Imagine how lucky we'd be if Congress had passed it way back in 1970......
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Brandishing isn't deadly force. Shooting them is.
Use your brain you fucking moron. What are you going to do if you "brandish" it and they call your bluff and still refuse to leave? Worse yet, what are you going to do if they make a grab for it? Shoot them? Have fun explaining to the jury why you escalated the situation to one of life and death when your life wasn't in danger to begin with.
I'm as pro-gun as they come but if I was on your jury I'd convict your ass in a heartbeat if that was the way it went down. A firearm is a last resort, intended for situations where the choice is kill or be killed.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
From TFS:
Micronesia and other countries in the region have their own Social Security Administrations which gave out numbers to residents applying for US disaster relief loans.
Since the loan originated in the US, the US would be the one to administer it. Part of getting a loan in the US is that copies of it get sent to the reporting bureaus. So, the Micronesians gave a SSN as an identifier, and some idiot somewhere decided it would be great if they just used that to identify the people on the application, regardless of country of origin, which is GP's point.
Right. And then the criminal sues you because you broke his arm or leg or whatever, as is happening with a local Pennsylvanian who hit a thief with a bat, to stop him from stealing his truck. The police arrested the homeowner, and the criminal is suing for medical expenses.
If the police arrested the man there's more to the story than meets the eye. None of the cops that I've met want to arrest a taxpayer who defended themselves against a scumbag. If they did it then I suspect they had reason.
Regarding the lawsuit, I'd say "bring it on". I've been in front of juries before and I'd take my chances with one if I was being sued by some criminal thug. I'd either win the lawsuit or I'd spend every last penny of my money on legal expenses and then file bankruptcy. Of course I'm a spiteful SOB like that ;)
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
I just realized that there is not much of a space for unique SSN's. 9 digits gives a maximum of 1 billion numbers. However, not every number is actually used.
That is correct.
I assume that there must at least be a control number to check if SSN can be valid, similar to how credit cards / ISBN work.
No. SSNs do not have any sort of check digit. If they did, then there would be a maximum of 100 Million numbers given, and they already would have ran out.
There could also be regional prefixes, similar to IP addresses (e.g. 111 = New York, 999 = California or something like that). etc. This would significantly reduce the number space.
The prefix identifies the state that the person lived in when they applied for a SSN. However, this doesn't really reduce the available numbers, because the state just uses them all up and then gets more prefixes from SSA.
Even if that's not the case, the population of US is ~ 300 million. There must have been more than 1 billion people who have lived/still living since the SSNs were first introduced. My question is, how did US not run out of unique numbers?
So far, approximately 360 Million SSNs have been assigned. They will run out eventually, and we will have to a new system, but not for a little while.
Do SSNs get reused?
No.
Saying you owe something you don't is defamation of character, the credit bureaus know that a SSN isn't an unique identifier, there are 304,059,724 people in the US and approximately 18 million people use a SSN assigned to someone else. Even with almost 809 million possible SSNs, because the first three digits are an Area number collisions are very likely and sooner or later will be unavoidable.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Surprisingly, they have no check digits. There's a summary about how the numbers work on Wikipedia The gist of it is that the first three numbers are "Area Numbers" which correspond to the Zip code of the mailing address you supplied when you applied for your SIN, the second three are "Group Numbers" which are issued in a weirdly non-sequential way and are for administrative grouping, and the last four are "Serial Numbers", which are issued in order within a group. If you're curious, you can look up on socialsecurity.gov the highest Area Number which have been allocated (772), and the highest Group Number for each area,
Cue The Sun...
Yeah, well, I know someone who had that same attitude. He heard noises one night, saw a figure in his living room and opened fire. Guess who he shot? Some dumbass drunk high school student who thought he was crawling back into the open window at his parents house. Thankfully the kid lived, but can you imagine if he hadn't? Could you live with yourself if you killed someone who turned out not to be a threat to you?
Actually, yes I could live with myself, just as much as I could live with myself if the drunk kid had hit me head on on the road and he didn't survive the accident. It was his one negligence that would have caused his death in both cases. Anyone comes wandering into my house unannounced and uninvited at night and they're dead - simple as that. It's not worth taking the risk. Drunk high school student, crack head looking for cash, or simple psychopath don't appear too different visually in the wee hours of the morning, and two of those three aren't likely to let you cozily slip off to your "defensible location". Once they've chosen to put themselves in that situation it's too late. If he can't control himself enough that he's so messed up that he's crawling into the wrong house window, then that kid was doing something just as dangerous as taking a car out on the road drunk.
It's personal responsibility. You go unannounced into a strangers house - ESPECIALLY after dark, and there's a very good chance that you're not coming back out. If you put yourself in that position then you have to live (or die) with the consequences.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
They were quite stunned when I told them to shut up and start suing.
Yeah, I love this strategy. I was hassled by an agency once that put at the bottom of their initial contact letter "if you do not respond within 14 days we will instruct our lawyers to recover this debt in court." I wrote a response, "Go ahead. Make my day."
Funnily enough, I never heard anything else from them. 6 months later, another agency starts trying to collect...