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Experian Sold Social Security Numbers To ID Theft Service
realized writes "Experian — one of the three national U.S. credit bureaus — reportedly sold SSNs through its subsidiary, Court Ventures, to the operators of SuperGet.info who then offered all of the information online for a price. The website would advertise having '99% to 100% of all USA' in their database on websites frequented by carders. Hieu Minh Ngo, the website owner, was recently been indicted for 15-counts filed under seal in November 2012, charging him with conspiracy to commit wire fraud, substantive wire fraud, conspiracy to commit identity fraud, substantive identity fraud, aggravated identity theft, conspiracy to commit access device fraud, and substantive access device fraud."
WHAT THE FUCK!!!?!!!?
The US Credit system is a racket designed to screw people. I have been fighting a bogus charge on my credit report for years and I would love to see the power that these behemoths lowered.
Granted, I do not know of a superior way to track people, but the amount of destruction caused by identity theft or improper billing is insane.
So if the credit bureau is selling all of the information to the identify thieves you're pretty much fucked.
Sounds like this company is playing both ends against the middle and needs to be shutdown.
Pathetic.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Even though Experian was selling the info, only the people who bought it will get punished.
I'm an American, so I'll admit that I couldn't find Experia on a map if I tried, but this is an outrage and I say we start bombing the Experians back to the stone age right now!
Oh god, is Slashdot now The Blaze, where everyone has Obama Derangement Syndrome and every single comment has to tie to Obama, no matter how loosely related they are?
I have a general question: why does the Social Security Number endure as the primary key of, well, every kind of financial account or transaction in the United States. The SSN - how it's assigned, how it's revoked, the regulations regarding who can use it and for what, what necessary safeguards are in place to prevent theft or misuse, its anonymity or lack thereof - was never intended for the tasks that it is now burdened with. It's broken in so many ways that it would be hilarious - if the consequences were not so dire.
Is it just that this is the system that we in the US are stuck with, and that's that? How do other countries handle this? What are the potential alternatives? What are the true requirements for a "master identifier key", and how can they be realized in a way accessible to all people? How can we convince the business and banking community to stop using the SSN - not because they're forced to, but because it's such an awful liability?
Which politicians' identities need to be stolen in order to put such a system in place?
Besides that, it's a horrible, horrible secret. Until just a few years ago the first five digits could be easily determined from your birthday and location of birth, leaving only 4 digits of somewhat randomness, and even that went in sequential order, giving you a pretty good guess at a much small range. To add insult to injury, whenever a company thinks they are helping you keep it secret they will ask you for the last four digits of the number, the only four digits that actually matter.
A very articulate and insightful comment. No sarcasm intended
Why does someone at one level of the crime get charged but not the one at the top. Remember:
Why are they not being charged? Using SSNs for certain things is illegal, and selling them probably is too - otherwise what did the other guy do wrong?
Agreed. I'd vote for hanging some of the Experian exec responsible for this.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
And how do you keep your mothers maiden name a secret?
Do you kill her and her parents and wipe out all traces of them?
Why do they use stupid shit like this to identify someone.
WHAT THE FUCK!!!?!!!?
According to TFA, basically the company that Experian purchased had already been selling information to the notorious 24-year old cyber criminal. Once the company was purchased, Experian didn't review its own transactions closely enough and inadvertently sold our SSNs to the guy too. Monthly. The Secret Service found out, captured the 24-year old, and it's unknown if Experian, credit watchdog, will suffer for sleeping on the job.
I'm not sure who appointed Experian watchdog (though I'm certain someone on Slashdot will point out how ignorant I am for not knowing), but for a company with so much power over your own life in terms of credit, it would be nice if, with the power came some sort of responsibility -- and accountability. I suppose we'll need to off Experian's Uncle Ben to get our point across...
Credit reporting ought to have everyone up in arms anyway. Every company an American does business with sends personal, financial details to these agencies. No permission required. The agencies themselves have a shared monopoly, but the size of their market is static. So they are always looking for quasi-legal ways to make even more money by selling your personal data. Sometimes quasi-illegal.
The whole system stinks. Americans need to get themselves some privacy rights...
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
For fuck's sake, it has nothing to do with obamacare. Stay on topic and stop trolling.
OK, so they put the ID theft guy in prison, how about having Experian's CEO in an adjoining cell? Why is it legal for Experian to sell my SS#??? I never gave them permission for that.
Free Martian Whores!
The solution to this issue is for the Social Security Administration to publish EVERY SSN along with name in a big set of phone type books, and online. The SSN was never intended to be a secret number.
Banks and credit organisations who use the SSN as some sort of secret code can find some other real authentication method. Publishing them all at once would 'shock' the system into the fix that is needed.
And my understanding is that once the card is opened, it's now on the consumer to dispute everything about the card,
I never understood that line of thought. If someone, e.g. a bank, says I owe them money because I agreed to repay them money they loaned to someone who claimed to be me, my first question would be "Where is the paper I signed?". If the contract was made at a branch of the bank, such as for a loan, my next question would be "Where is the video footage of me at that bank?".
Because if they don't have those two items, and they indisputably prove it is me, they have absolutely no case to try to extort money from me. They can go after the actual person they gave money or credit to. Why should it not be that way for all cases of so-called "identity theft"? It used to be called "bank fraud", which firmly shows the bank is the victim of fraud, and should have been more diligent in its actions. Instead they now imply the party who should have been more pro-active is the person whose name was used without their knowledge.
Stop calling it ID theft, call it bank fraud, and tell the banks they can get their money from whomever they decided to give it to.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
You have no idea what you're talking about. Indeed, the FICO score is strictly a model from the Fair Isaac Corporation. However, that model is licensed out to the major credit bureaus, and they will indeed provide you a FICO score. However, any FICO score is only as good as the information it's based on. Since all three credit bureaus can happen to have different info on you, you can have a different FICO score with each of them. That's why all the ads you see talk about checking your three FICO scores - the algorithm is the same in all cases, it's just coming up with different results due to different inputs.
Now as to what the GP was saying, Experian has it's own, non-FICO score too, that they'll sell you (in addition to selling you a FICO score, should you pay for that), for a price. That's the "even more made up" number the GP is referring to, which has the name VantageScore. It's not your FICO score, and due to the less licensing and federal regulation surrounding it, costs less. However, the GP is wrong in sticking this with Experian - all three major bureaus jointly use VantageScore.
And lastly, folks pulling credit history that aren't making a direct loan (ex: insurers), usually don't pull a FICO score, since it's expensive, relatively speaking, but will pull yet another number made up by the three bureaus (what it is depends on what you're looking to insure - they have separate scores for auto and homeowner's insurance). All of this has made the FICO score itself much less important than it used to be. It's still the gold standard for big, big ticket items, where a mortgage company has no problem spending the $ to get the FICO score from all three bureaus to insure their hundreds of thousands of lending to you.
That actually happened to my wife. She got a call from American Express stating that we were in default on a card she had taken out and bills were being sent to an address in Las Vegas. They demanded that we pay in the most aggressive legal way they could. I told them that it isn't my fault that they didn't do their due diligence in giving out credit and that since it was a credit card we were only liable for up to $50 of it and I wasn't going to even pay that since neither of us had ever been in Nevada let alone Las Vegas. I then mentioned that if I ever heard from them again I would be filing charges against them for attempting to defraud me and would also be filing a complaint with my state's attorney general. Never heard back from them. I do the same thing with the idiots who keep buying someone's bad college loan debt that was accrued 14 years before I was born who happens to share my name. Some new company seems to buy it every 2-3 years and then they start calling or sending mail so I don't know if it is a scam or not but I treat it as if it were one.
Time to offend someone