Hacker News Reader

Comment by thisisit | Hacker News Reader

> Mr. Lyles secured credit cards often using fictional names and numbers the Social Security Administration hadn’t yet assigned.

So, the credit reporting companies cannot verify if the SSN is real or not? That sounds like the worst identity verification system.

View on HN

SSNs aren't supposed to be used for identification. That said the Social Security Administration does have a site that allows for validating SSNs. It appears to be geared toward employers verifying SSNs for employment (and therefor tax purposes), the terms may preclude using it for credit reporting purposes.

https://www.ssa.gov/employer/ssnv.htm

The root problem here is that they're using a public number which was never designed for identification purposes and has no security. The solution would be a national ID, or expansion of the US Passport with in-built security measures. Although that goes over like a lead balloon whenever it's brought up.

So only issue credit cards to people with a passport, and give them a statement credit to cover the application fee (premium annual fee cards already cover the cost of precheck/global entry, this isn't a stretch). It's even possible the finance industry could negotiate with the US government a lower rate for passports at scale, thereby turning it into a defacto national ID system.

This is just finance industry whining that their system sucks and they want to offload the costs onto the government to manage the fraud.

EDIT: "In January, Accenture PLC listed synthetic-identity fraud as one of the biggest threats facing banks in 2018, saying it would be “costing banks billions of dollars and countless hours as they chase down people who don’t even exist.”

That pays for a lot of passports!

Disclaimer: Am in finance industry, but not credit issuance.

I don't actually have a problem with that as a solution to using a stronger ID. I still think it would need to be coupled with an additional security token or key on the passport side to complete the security, but that's a relatively simple change versus implementing a new ID system from scratch.

Although I don't think they're trying to pass the cost to the government. By calling it "identity theft" instead of what it is, fraud, they're trying to pass the cost of fraud to the consumer.

Agree with the rest of your comment.

[1] https://login.gov/

I'll have to check that out. Thanks. :)

there are various legal reasons (e.g. parole) why you might be denied a passport that have nothing to do with whether credit should be extended to you.

Edge cases can be addressed. Still issue the passport, but put a travel hold on it. This allows for the identifier to still be generated and managed.

EDIT: After coffee, I'm even more convinced this is a good idea. Better to issue the passport and have the identifier of who you don't want to travel vs not issuing it and then losing that person in the noise....because of not having a national ID card system.

Do you consider Real ID equivalent to a passport or are you really saying we need to make 200,000,000 people get an international passport that they're likely to never use?

The word "make" makes me sigh. Is it too much trouble to get your picture taken and fill out a form? It's no different than a driver's license application process, while at the same time providing needed identification verification capabilities. The sugar on top is you're giving Americans the ability to travel internationally, which one might optimistically assume would provide some necessary perspective.

A passport should be freely provided to you by your government as part of being a citizen.

> some necessary perspective

I'd venture to guess that if you were making minimum wage and living in a place that was either a 700 mile drive or a $1000 airplane ticket from an international border, you might understand why it seems unnecessary. (Do you honestly believe that most non-traveling Americans are doing it because they don't have a passport?)

Lawful permanent residents and other residents of the US who are not eligible for a US passport may also want to avail themselves of the benefits of a credit card. Fewer than half of US Citizens have a passport, and they may all want a credit card as well.

Lawful permanent residents also have a green-card or other immigration related ID number which can serve the same purpose. They likely also possess a foreign passport which could be used in the same way.

Less than half of the eligible population of the US votes also. That doesn't mean that it's a bad idea, just that it's not taken advantage of.

EDIT: a word.

They would almost all have passports that the US government considered satisfactory though.

> Although that goes over like a lead balloon whenever it's brought up.

Coming with a country that has a national ID, the US issue with it always caused me laughter. But on the other hand, identification by the state is one of the highest forms of privacy. Its pretty incredible the US has managed to be without that.

Do you also laugh at the EU's "right to be forgotten" legislation?

I think its trying to stop sunlight with your hands.

Technology is the servant of society, not the other way around. The sky is not falling because the tech industry is finally being reined in.

[+] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16531817 | [+] http://locusmag.com/2018/03/cory-doctorow-lets-get-better-at...

Wouldn't the analogy be that we are the servants to the state, as the state tells you what you can or can't do?

No, because we have the right to vote, making the state the servant to us. Whether we have properly executed that responsibility is clearly a discussion for a different thread.

You have the right not to use online services...the right to vote is not a declaration of submission.

Particularly when you voted against and a measure was still infringed upon you.

In practice, more than 90% of US adults have a state issued photo id:

http://www.projectvote.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/AMERIC...

And not having one often puts people at a disadvantage. So it's a little fuzzier than managing to be without them.

>The root problem here is that they're using a public number which was never designed for identification purposes and has no security. The solution would be a national ID, or expansion of the US Passport with in-built security measures.

No identifier can ever be used as method to express authorization. This is not a matter of security design.

You're overstating the role of the CRA. They don't provide facts, they provide intelligence and let the recipient draw their own conclusions.

FWIW there is a boolean "deceased" flag on credit reports (internally). I don't know by what means or how often it gets updated.

They get a lot of denormalized data. Just because an SSN:name pair presented to them isn't legit doesn't mean there isn't a real person associated with it.

There's a limit to the accuracy of credit reporting given the nature of their inputs. 123-45-6789 for Janice Smith, 123-45-6789 for Jane Smith and 123-46-6789 for Janice Deer are all the same person, but there's value in maintaining even the inconsistencies-- when an inquiry comes in at 123-46-6789 for Tran Nguyen, it's obvious something is up with one of the two parties, but without further investigation we don't know if it's a typo or fraud. Then the manual review process starts.

Entity resolution is a very complex problem to do correctly at scale. Phone numbers and addresses are shared across entities over time and can be typoed. Social security numbers can be typed incorrectly, or the name (and nowadays, gender!) associated with them changes freely. For all we know Tran and Jane are the same person; there are circumstances that have led to such oddness. Foreign passports or IDs may not match up to anything seen before, and they can't exactly hit a Romanian government API to validate numbers presented, yet they can't deny the existence of an applicant based on metrics they don't know about-- they can only share what they know.

No it’s actually really Simple to test if an SSN (a) has been issued and (b) is not deceased (had to do it in s project about 20 years ago, there is a file of highest issued numbers and a file of deceased SSNs)

So they can verify it. Apparently they don’t which somehow doesn’t surprise me at all

Yeah, it's always a lot of fun for me actually convincing banks they're allowed to open accounts for me, when I was born 40 years ago but my SSN was "issued 12 years ago"...

There job seems to mostly be to grab information so they can centralize it and make it easy to steal/sell/put at risk. Unless someone can demonstrate that their data is bad at scale, which would likely be very difficult when all of the risk calculations are probablistic anyways, I don't think they have a huge actual incentive to verify shit do they?

Their customers already trust them, the trust is basically implicit, does anyone actually check what they do?

I work for a Credit Reference Agency (but I am not speaking for them here). Just because the CRA says "We have no record of this person" doesn't (and shouldn't) mean they don't exist.

It's up to the card issuer whether "the customer might not even exist" is a risk they are up for taking.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com