Data Breach: 2.9 Billion Social Security Numbers at risk

One way legit SSNs are being misused is filing for IRS refunds, as early on the tax filing season to get the fraudulent tax return to the IRS before the actual taxpayers. As I understand it, they file a return lots & lots of new dependents, very low income, get a big tax refund before the IRS verifies much of anything.

Another problem is the income reported by the criminal using your SSN is added to your records & eventually, but not soon, the IRS sees you only paid taxes on the income YOU earned, not what YOU & the criminal earned. The IRS is nice enough to give you 7-30 days to pay up or have your tax refunds seized or start proceedings to grab your bank accounts.

Lock your SSN or don't. It doesn't help me or hurt me either way. I've had ID theft cause me problems. A few minutes, literally, is less trouble to me than the months typically spent cleaning up the problem. It is not true that "If I don't know about it, it can't hurt me." You do you. I'll be just fine.

 

Documented? Or undocumented?

 

The question doesn't make sense. The number here is twice the population of China. Do you think the United States has twice the population of China?

 

Makes perfect sense. Live down here in the dirty south and see all the undocumented “citizens” that border hop. They buy stolen id numbers to get things here. Every hispanic family has at least one illegal living with them and many have a family or more. You see travel trailers sided up to houses or other garage like looking buildings being built to get around codes to house them. With govment giving out more money per child like candy to women so more children per household is permitted. So yes i believe we have more then china.
All you have to do is get out and drive these days to see it. You can be out in the middle of BFE and still find heavy traffic. Tell me were all these people are coming from?

 

What difference does the number of ID files breached make to whether one should protect their ID number? NEWSFLASH: Media reports contain inaccuracies.

 

Well I guess it took about 4 hours but I was able to

order a copy of my DAC
Request a Copy of My DAC Report | Candidate Help Center

Get my credit reports
Annual Credit Report.com - Home Page

Lock my social security #
myE-Verify

And freeze my credit at the 3 credit agencies. You have to make accounts at all three and there is a lot of info about your credit so you might skip getting your credit reports and just do this one first.
How to place or lift a security freeze on your credit report | USAGov

It took a while just verifying them the right websites but they are. Always look for the s in https (means secure or a lock picture before the web address before putting any info into a website. Youll need your SS# and an email and a phone and a laptop/tablet. And some patience.

A password manager, if you dont have one, is probably the best thing for protecting your online accounts. I use a paid one at $10 a year. There are free ones too. They can take a bit to get used to using so maybe make the first ones you enter not super important like medical accounts or whatever and make notes on paper until you see hoe it works. You can make some really random and long passwords and store them you just need to remember or write down one really strong password and the rest are encrypted. You can google search popular password managers. Everything else was free.

If you get targeted by a knowledgeable hacker they will probably be able to get you anyway but this prevents you from being swept up in large scale operations where they are looking for the low hanging fruit.

If you dont do anything else make a really strong password for your email and dont use that password for anything else. And dont reuse passwords for anything important like online banking and shopping and stuff like that.

Luck in battle lol

 

I believe the culprit is National Public Data dot com. And I think said culprit is a scumbag data seller.
They sell people's personal information for money. Well, the culprit got hacked and the hacker dumped 2.9 billion accounts on the "dark web".
My Identity Theft company notified me Tuesday that my ss# is out there. And I have been very careful all my life with my ID. I don't even have any social media.

 

Here are 2 sites listed by PC Mag that allow you to check if your info was breached. I don't know anything about these sites except what PC Mag says about them.

National Public Data (NPD) Breach Check & Search

NPD Breach Check - Pentester.com

I find the first site returns less false alarms than the 2nd. The 2nd web site seems to return info if you have a credit file, not just it your info was one that was breached recently.

 

I would be extremely careful putting such delicate info into a website that's not a .gov. You're basically creating another security breach by giving your info away to strangers.

 

Agreed