My British passport has expired, so I went to the post office to pick up the forms for a renewal.
It then dawned on me how easy it would be to obtain everything worth knowing about me by simply intercepting the forms as I post them back to the passport office.
This is what would be contained inside that envelope:
My Name, Address, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Phone Number, Signature, Current (expired) Passport, Two photos of me. And either a cheque, or Full Credit card details, including 3 digit Secuirty number.
Fortunately, for an extra 10% charge for a “check and send” I took the form straight to the post office where I paid cash. I still do not know how my form travels from there to the passport office, I assume it is more secure because the teller binned the envelope and sealed my forums in a plastic wallet.
Do you really think your average postal worker is in the business of procuring a new identity? :rolleyes:
Seriously, every bloody time you use an ATM, sign for a C/C transaction, enter password details online, book a flight over the internet or even use a simple debit card at the supermarket, your details are being recorded and used by SOMEBODY, somewhere and can be put to nefarious uses as well.
Actually, they are more than likely being recorded by SOMETHING probably on a secure server with encryption, if an employee somewhere needs to see the transaction details or print an invoice, in my experience they dont get all the information.
You can be as cavalier as you like with your own details, don’t come crying to me when you are getting billed for postal worker A’s flamboyant lifestyle.
My company’s credit union has its headquarters in Maryland. I called to see about opening an account, and the ONLY WAY I could do that was to mail them an application with every single piece of information a person would need to steal my identy. :rolleyes: So I’m opening an account with a local bank instead.
Wife of 23-year veteran letter carrier here. Postal workers, both in the sorting facilities and those carrying mail on the street, see hundreds, if not thousands of pieces of mail in a week. They don’t have the time, or the means, to distinguish Business Letter A that might contain personal details which, when stolen, would enable them to relocate to Rio with a stable of mistresses and a private jet, from Business Letter B that might contain payment of a gas bill.
One cold winter a really lazy mail carrier decided that it would be easier to deliver the mail only to every third house. My mailbox got my mail plus the mail for the two neighbours on my left and the two neighbours on my right. I got some great mail! At least two credit cards were delivered right to me, so why not a passport?
When my daughter was about 12 weeks old, we had to apply for her (Swedish) passport from the US. My husband decided to renew his at the same time. After all the rigamarole, we had to mail all of their info/photos/paperwork to the New York consulate. From there, it traveled to Sweden in a diplomatic pouch. Or it was supposed to. In actuality, a month later we got a letter tell us that the carrier “lost” the entire diplomatic pouch.
But what can you do? You can’t go nuts over it all.
Indeed, and if thats not enough the envelope supplied has a big printed logo in the bottom left corner saying:
Home Office Identity & Passport Services
Son of a career postal clerk here- No, but you can’t convince me that anyone but the delivery guy is the one that lightened my expected gift of a Barnes & Noble gift card from the peeled open bottom flap of a manila envelope while he was carrying it to my apartment cluster box.
Not really in the same vein as what you’re talking about in this thread, but I came across an “identity theft made easy” situation today;
Looking over sample programs to write for an Into to computing class, one involved inputing Social Insurance Numbers, and doing the math needed to determine if it was a valid number or not (apparently some arithmetic can be done on the first 8 numbers, which then determines the last one). This was an actual assignment given to the class in a previous year.
So there are a few random input suggestions, including something that works out to a true value, and then the question asks you to input your own SIN. Ok, fine, except that this was asked to be shown on a copy of the output file to be submitted with the homework!!
So a TA, or a prof could now have several students’ names and social insurance number! I have no idea if that alone is enough to pull of identity theft, and I admit the likelihood isn’t very big, but still… very bizarre thing to ask students to submit!
Sometimes you get a new identity handed right to you.
The first time I came to Tokyo, I was walking around my friend’s neighborhood looking for places available to rent when we found someone’s credit card lying on the ground. My friend’s (Japanese) wife came with us to turn it in at the local police box (neither of us were all that fluent in Japanese at the time). After we turned it in, the policeman there asked us, “if nobody comes to claim it, do you want it?”
Did the taxes last weekend. One option was direct deposit for the refund.
So let me think about it. Already the envelope will have the IRS refund address on it. Inside are our names, address, SSNs, ages, etc. And to top it all off, we could choose to include a form with our bank account routing info on it.
[Former SIN issuing employee hat on]
This is known as a Mod 10 check, and it (and similar checks such as Mod 11) is a standard method of first-pass screening for input errors in ID numbers. (See this Wikipedia article for more info.)
Thanks for the link. We did something similar in class with ISBN numbers, so I had a sense of what was happening, but truth is I didn’t look at the example enough to comment on it further than to say that handing your SIN to your TA and prof probably isn’t a good idea!
I might try it out tonight, though, to give me some practise for tomorrow’s midterm!
I’ve had passports arrive in my mailbox. I opened the letters without noticing they were misaddressed. Fortunately, they were for the last tenants and I knew what city they had moved to and they were in the phone listings for that city.
