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Comment by NickBusey | Hacker News Reader

You by no means have to give your real information.

I recommend using something like Bitwarden's passphrase generator so all your answers are things like `concise myth bird`.

This way they are A: actually secure, and B: easily pronounceable, so that just saying "a bunch of letters and numbers" to a phone tech shouldn't work as I've heard people complain can happen when using normal passwords (e.g., c9b21s1qzs) for these fields.

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Inaccurate but plausible is the advice I've been given for these. My bank insists on a "memorable name" (was formerly "mother's maiden name" - I confirmed it didn't have to be accurate), so I use one that was basically picked out of a hat, which has no connection to me or my family.

How legal is it to give false information to a bank?

> How legal is it to give false information to a bank?

Irrelevant. These are only security questions. They can be anything, and in fact, for most of them they are not supposed to know.

If you are applying for one of their products and you get a form, and THEN you provide false information, it's a different matter.

The difference is whether there is an intent to deceive for gain. Lying about my income on a credit application is different from lying whether my favorite food is pizza.

They are _only_ used for security, and now that it's "memorable name", it's not false information anyway. If the bank were using it for any other purpose, such as a credit check, that would be a different matter, and quite well might not be legal.

My banks "security questions" were my DOB and my country of birth - verified against my passport. Not really much help.

Hey, at least those are immutable and memorable facts. Not great from the standpoint of adding security, certainly, but I'd rather have that than things like "who is your favorite band", which I'll have no hope of reproducing five years from now, and which will only serve to lock me out of my own account.

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