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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."
Fuck you! i do not owe you any money so you sort it out, it is not my problem
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
All this, caused by someone too lazy to add a "if (country == USA)" statement.
I don't know. The government has been running our K-12 public education system so effectively, if we trust the government with our childrens futures we can trust them with our health.
looks like the data (ssn) needs a little metadata (issuing authority, distinguished name) in order to make it work.
Or, as I've questioned previously on here, WTF are the credit rating agencies in the US using non-unique identifiers (and identifiers that shouldn't be used outside a social security scenario) when (usually the exact same) credit agencies in other countries can manage using other (available) data? (Name, DOB, (Previous and current) Address?)
For example in the UK, the equivalent to the SSN is the National Insurance (NI) number - this is never used by the CRAs - only by HMRC (tax office.)
Anyway, sure, they still get false positives using these details (the most common seems to be when they use the name only), but not quite on this sort of scale.
http://harridanic.com
The SSA simply needs to announce that from next January, all new SSNs issued will be 22+ digits long and will be identical for the first or last 9 digits. They wouldn't have to do it, but it would force lots of places to plan for a future change. They could also start putting in a checksum on some new cards or throwing in letters. Remember the common mod 10 checksum used for things like credit cards was designed to work with EBCDIC letters.
OK, first I'll comment in saying that I think you finally found a use for IPv6 address space...Nice one.
Unfortunately, this number "reform" pretty much all becomes a fucking mute point unless we have some REAL SSA reform to go along with it.
Sorry if it seems I'm a little bitter. I'm due to collect SS the very year they're due to be broke, fuck you very much.
Not using debt doesn't help when the idiots are assigning someone else's debt to you...
The "credit" required to buy a house or even a new car is a lot less than the credit needed to buy a new computer system or household appliances. Collateral worth repossessing means a lot more to creditors than your credit score. Credit score is is just a way to justify the excessive interest rates they want to apply. Buying real estate is easy. As for buying a new car? What are you thinking?! But I will say that saving up $20k or so becomes fairly easy once the saving habit is formed. Once you stop being tempted to buy crap you just don't need, you will find that you have lots more money than you've ever had in your pockets.
You are pretty well invested into the mythology of the credit game. It's time you spoke with your grandparents about how things used to be before this game was created and learn why they always had big savings accounts and other interest bearing accounts. It was no accident. It was the way things were done. Now days, people don't save at all. Having a couple thousand dollars in an account is pretty rare for most people. It's actually rather tragic. Nearly everyone lives in debt.
If you have enough sense to browse the comments, you'll find common themes:
1. The Fair Debt Collection Practices Act is pretty effective at helping you deal with collectors, so go read the law.
2. You can usually get a good response by writing a letter (and you'll see why if you read the law). At the minimum you can make them comply with a "do not call me" request and make them correspond by letter.
I will add a bit of my own wisdom. Find out the laws in your state and record your telephone. I happen to be in a "one party knows" state, so I can record my calls without saying. I always ask the state the collector is in and look it up to see if it is compatible (otherwise you may need to inform them if you want to use the recordings in court).
Review your telephone recordings. Sometimes collectors will say things that don't mean quite what you think when you are on the line and under stress. I found reviewing the recordings left me with "ah ha" moments, especially when I took the conversation in the context of the FDCPA.
Despite some other commentor's opinions it was my experience that debt collectors are often professional thugs. It makes sense, thugs have to work somewhere too, and you do what you are good at.
If you have to pay a collector (I owed for a legitimate claim one time when there was a billing mistake), I recommend a one-time use credit card number. It can't be double billed if you set a limit at the correct amount. Believe me, you don't want to try to collect from a collector who owes you money because they screwed up. You can be successful, but you won't enjoy it.
Remember, you want to be polite but firm. You want your recorded voice (remember, you're going to be taping this) to sound reasonable. If you take this collector to court, you want them to be the asshole. You want the judge to get pissed on your behalf and zing them with a judgment.
In a libertarian system there'd be no need to sue them for defamation, the wronged party could just go round and kick their fucking heads in.
True enough, but wronged party would probably just say "fuck it!" long before he got the road built even halfway to his offender's place.
I am not a crackpot.
The formula for calculating your credit score is not logical. Your credit score should not depend on how much interest you have paid over the years to creditors. People with the highest credit scores have paid more in interest and other unneeded fees than people who have not relied on credit. People who do not utilize credit have a score of 0. People who do not utilize credit should have the highest credit score because these people are the most financially stable. Credit is an arrangement for deferred payment for goods and services. Financially stable people do not need to defer payments.