Hacker News Reader

Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

The reaction here seems pretty over the top to me. Leaking a bunch of private information is bad, I guess. As a former federal employee, my SSN/etc. were leaked in the OPM breach a couple of years ago. So far, it’s hard zero repercussions for me (or anybody else I know). There are many layers of defense mechanisms in place. It’s not like just having some numbers let’s you do whatever you want. The US banking system has a ton of human checks and balances and ways to reverse things in place. If I ever saw an unusual charge on my credit cards, I’d just get it refunded. How much actual harm is going to come out of this? My suspicion is not that much.

View on HN

> If I ever saw an unusual charge on my credit cards, I’d just get it refunded. How much actual harm is going to come out of this? My suspicion is not that much.

Fraudulent charges on an existing account is not the concern when someone has your SSN and other high-value information - it's the ability for someone else to open an account in your name that you have no knowledge of.

This is the thing that bites you. Someone opens a store credit card in your name, uses it enough to get the credit limit to a point where they can walk off with enough stuff to make it worthwhile. Guess who gets reported to the debt collectors? Not them, you do.

And here is the really sad bit, when you tell the debt collector that its a bogus account and not you, by law they have to stop hassling you but instead of 'retiring' the debt they just resell it to another debt collector to get back some of the money they paid for it. So the cycle doesn't stop.

It's also illegal to sell a debt when the owner has knowledge that it is fraudulent.

Yes it is, but that is much harder to prove, and not something I can do in small claims. Nor can I easily get the local AG to do it for me in the area where they operate (I've tried, they just laugh at me)

Too bad patio11 has a full time job now. Sounds like something he'd have fun with.

Okay, so someone opens up a credit card in your name. They either use your address, and you notice because you get the correspondence, or they don't, and you have an easy way of disavowing any attempt at collection by showing the discrepancy in the address.

No doubt these layers of protection will fail for some people. Maybe Equifax should be required to set up a fund to pay out to such people. But it's not apocalyptic like people are making it out to be. OPM leaked the records of about 20 million people a few years ago. So far, there hasn't been any sort of mass-scale impact as a result of that breach.

The worst case scenario is identity confusion resulting in getting someone else's criminal record: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/apr/03/identity-the...

(although that appears to be ordinary incompetence)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com