Some examples either me or my husband have gotten:
-What month was [person] born? [person] was my mom and one option was "I don't know [person]." Luckily they didn't ask the date, because I don't know that, but I do know the month.
-Which of the following people are/were you associated with?, my ex-roommate as one of the answers. Makes sense to connect us if we had the same address at the same time.
-Which of the following people are/were you associated with?, my ex as one of the answers. This one baffled me because we never lived together and never had a bank account or loan together.
Which town did/does [person] live in? Where [person] was my husband's brother. Of course, useless if everyone still lives in their hometown.
I've also been asked about the previous cars I've owned, which are from DMV and insurance databases, not credit reports.
The entire concept of KBA is flawed and pretty shitty all around.
Yikes. Where did they get that from? I wonder if they also collected tons of info from FaceBook like it seems everyone else has.
We never had an insurance policy together or anything else like that either.
Beneficiary, certainly not, I was in college, broke as fuck, and living on student loans, didn't have any sort of assets to speak of (besides a $900 car), no retirement accounts or insurance policies (besides the minimum liability insurance required by the state).
What's weird is that they get this information from random sources and use it for verification without verifying it's actually accurate first. That's just bonkers.
I literally have no way to know which one of these they think is correct. At least 2 of them were correct at some point, depending on how up-to-date the data was, and the last three were indistinguishable, even when looking at my actual statements for my loan... So I failed out of my KBAs 4 straight times because they kept giving different variants of the same question, just with different sets of answers, until I could venn diagram out which one must be right because it was the only one that came up in all 4.
Then, of course, what if you get a question about your sister when she's toxic and you've cut her out of your life. Or even just naturally lost touch with her over the years.
When I was a kid I was briefly a ward of the court. During that time, I had an official address that was not where I actually lived, and somehow the credit bureaus got ahold of that information.
So whenever I need to answer the suite of questions for identity verification, if I get the "which of these places have you lived", there's a good chance I won't know the answer, because I was a kid and never actually lived there.
So when that happens, I guess at one of the addresses, inevitably get it wrong, fail my own identity verification process, and need to jump through a ton of hoops to either re-try the process and hope I don't get that question, or verify my identity another way.
It should be free (apart from postage).
I've had online car insurance instant-quote systems show me a list including both my current and previously owned cars with just a name and address, so that's encouraging that it's being used as a critical authentication measure.
That's aside from the fact that Equifax's site has never worked right for me anyway, and doesn't accept my information. Never been able to pull my report online from them. The other two major agencies work fine.