They have a direct relationship with Equifax and TransUnion, two of the major credit bureaus in the US. That is where the identity data comes from.

The first phase is to verify your identity by matching it against an authoritative data set, likely a credit file at either Equifax or TransUnion in this case. Once that data is matched, a set of questions from that data is generated. Your identity was likely matched against someone with similar identity information, hence the odd questions.

Do you a similar name to other people in your household? The good news is that the question set verifies you against the information it fetched. If you are not, you should fail the question set.

We at BlockScore provide an identity verification and question set service. Properly tuning the service to match the right person takes a lot of secret sauce because there is a lot of imperfect data. Thankfully we have this working well.