So I ordered a copy of my credit report through annualcreditreport.com, and it turns out that I have an alternate SSN that is just plain bogus.
How serious could this be for me? I don’t see any accounts that aren’t mine on the report. I went through every one.
There’s another “robert_columbia” out there.
Call/contact the credit bureau issuing the report and tell 'em about the bogus number. If the agency refuses to delete the number (some places are downright snotty), then you can have a note attached to the report stating the SSN is NOT yours.
~VOW
Just remember that credit bureaus will associate anything to anything whether it makes sense or not, and it’s entirely up to the victim to correct it. Or even detect it, as they won’t notify you if anything is changed or added to your credit report.
It’s very one-sided and biased against the honest citizen.
What Musicat said. For awhile back in the 90s I ran a skip tracing outfit. We made extensive use of not credit reports, but all the non-credit personal info which is also sold by the credit bureaus.
It was very common for former roommates’ account data to be intermingled for decades after they’d last lived at the same address. Or even for data from a tenant to be connected to the prior or subsequent tenant of the same apartment. Or the prior or subsequent renter of a particular PO box.
My Mom has the same first initial as I do. 15 years after I’d moved out of her house and we both were living in different states from that house, she & her then-current address suddenly appeared connected to my credit agency biographical data. The fact we had the same first initial, same last name, and had once shared an adddress was close enough for Trans Union or whoever to link us together.
And, as **Musicat **said, it’s 100% your job to police this stuff; nobody else will. Merely having buggered-up data isn’t a crisis. But it takes a long time to clean up, like months. If the first time you discover a real problem is when you get turned down for a house, car, or apartment you really need, it’ll be too late to fix the mess timely.
An ounce of prevention & all that …
There are credit monitoring services like Zendough that will, for a small fee, keep an eye on your credit and notify you immediately if anyone accesses, alters or appends data to it. I can’t recommend any such services since I have used them seldom.
I once had a “former” address on my list, a place where I never lived, in fact, it is a PMB mail drop. Someone used the info from a Diner’s Club receipt to put thru a change of address for me (back in the days when you could do that without verification). 3 months later, when Diner’s Club started calling me for payment from bogus charges, the scheme was revealed and I never lost anything. We know exactly how & where the ID theft happened, since I only used the card one time in 5 years, at an airport in Chicago.
But the bogus address stayed on my list for 30 years. Since there was nothing adverse associated with it, I didn’t bother to get it changed, but neither did Diner’s Club.
That’s just an example of how fast & loose credit bureaus play with data and the utter disregard they have for accuracy.
And if you happen to have the same name as your father or son, but you are “Jr.” or “Sr.”, I can guarantee there will be some confusion, especially if you ever shared any address, however brief.
Yep, just the other SSN by itself isn’t a problem. Some creditor somewhere once associated that SSN with you, possibly completely by mistake, or because it was someone who was sharing an address or something with you. It doesn’t necessarily mean identity theft. I see probably about 100 credit reports a week and maybe 10 percent of them have more than one SSN. Note that they’re not really trying for “accuracy” here, they’re doing a search based on your information and every result gets reported.