What are the odds someone else has used your Social Security number? One in seven.
That’s the stunning conclusion of a San Diego company's analysis of 290 million Social Security numbers, which found that 40 million of them have been attached to more than one name. The study, conducted by the fraud-fighting firm ID Analytics, is the first of its kind that’s been made available to the public.
We first wrote about the problem of “SSN-only” identity theft five years ago, and estimated that millions of Americans were on the “secret list of identity theft victims” whose SSNs had been misappropriated by an imposter to obtain work or credit.
The IRS often knows when this happens, when the imposter pays taxes. The Social Security Administration knows, too, for the same reason. And the nation's credit bureaus usually know, because the imposter often ends up applying for some form of credit. Plenty of financial institutions also have access to this information.
But no one is telling you. In short, all these government agencies and financial firms don't think you have a right to know.
Normally, the company receives credit applications from clients and checks them against its vast database, looking for signs of fraud. Criminals do crafty things like apply for a credit card at 10 different banks using SSNs that are only one digit away from each other. Or they use slightly different first names or street addresses in an attempt to evade a poor credit history or crime record. Because ID Analytics receives applications from multiple industries, it can spot these signs of fraud in ways that the individual companies cannot.
One typical pattern: An imposter uses one name but alternate Social Security numbers in an attempt to circumvent the credit reporting system; ID Analytics is geared up to spot just that kind of evasion. It’s a tough job, because the incidence of multiple numbers connected to the same name is enormous: Dr. Stephen Coggeshall, chief technology officer at the firm, said 20 million Americans have multiple SSNs associated with their names, or 6 percent of the total population.
ID Analytics says it has 3 million to 4 million names that have been used to commit identity fraud.
That’s an astonishing number, but it pales in comparison to the next figure.
Five million SSNs attached to three or more people
Recently, Coggeshall decided to reverse his research. Instead of looking for people connected to multiple SSNs, which is most useful for businesses, he looked at SSNs that are connected to multiple people, much more interesting to consumers. In other words, how many people in the U.S. are essentially sharing their identities with someone else?
The answer: 40 million. That means nearly one in 7 SSN holders in the U.S. have two or more names attached to their SSN records.
Please note, this is not an estimate conjured up from a sample. This is ID Analytics looking at its own data, picking out SSNs that have more than one name attached and building its own list. We now know: The secret list of ID theft victims has 40 million people on it.
Link:
http://redtape.msnbc.com/2010/12/odds-someone-else-has-your-ssn-one-in-7.html