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Comment by lightbyte | Hacker News Reader

>but when it came time to verify myself by answering questions they clearly started asking me questions about someone else's profile because none of the questions made any sense

Just a note, this most likely is not what happened. Identify verification questions typically will ask questions like "Who is your current house mortgage with?" when you have none and they will include a "None of the above" answer, which you're supposed to pick. It's totally intentional.

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When I went through one of these there was NO none of the above answers. Basically, you're screwed because you realize they are asking about someone else who was at your address 50 years ago, who drives a motorcycle (no option to say no such thing), has 3 kids who had college loans (no answer to say no such thing), and is on their 3rd housing mortgage (no option to say no such thing).

And what else can you do? You select randomly and then pass the 'id verification' with flying colours and then on the phone with the customer service rep, you verbally refute each one. The service rep says that they don't see any on that on their end.

Basically, it's like a web script that's not hooked up to anything in the backend... Like their recent "has your information been leaked" web forms.

I suspect that's the case across the entire industry.

I recently tried to dispute something on my Equifax report and I could not get past the verification stage. The answers to all the questions were obvious, but after failing the verification several times, I started wondering, "Did I open an account with x, y, or z back in 2011?"

The best ones are where you did legitimately open a credit line 20 years ago with some store but the list of options only include the backing bank's name ("BANCORP BANK, INC").

I had an interesting experience with these 'trick questions' doing the Creditkarma signup - I was asked four questions, three of which were fakes ('none of the above'), only the last question was legitimate. Either that's a random edge case, or a very sneaky intentional design...

Barclays' "3D Secure" asks two questions when verifying an online purchase and I can only recall a single occasion when one wasn't 'none of the above'.

It does ask for your sort code as a third question though, that's a one in four chance if you were picking randomly.

I've done identity verification dozens of times. I know how that works. The questions they asked were more specific and therefore more wrong. More along the lines of "Who owns the mortgage on your house at address 1234 Abcd Rd, Somecity, Somestate, 991234?" and "You made your last college loan payment on <wrongdate>. Which lender was it to?" Because my thought is "House? Where? When?" And when that happens for every question one gets miiighty suspicious.

Most of those questions have a real answer available. They'll occasionally toss in ones where you have to enter "none," but most aren't like that. If you got something where every single correct answer was "none," something probably got screwed up. Otherwise it would be way too easy to spoof!

Yes, but man is it confusing. The question should be something like "Do you have a home mortgage and if so who is it with?"

It's supposed to look real so people who aren't you fail the question. They will think, "well he lives near X or uses Y for something else, so it's probably that one". There isn't any indication that it may be false.

I don't understand your complaint at all. Phrasing the question differently doesn't deter people who are guessing, but it does deter people who don't understand what is being asked! People clearly (myself included) get confused at those questions and think they're incorrect - so change the question. Doing so doesn't make it harder to guess the answer, but it does make it easier to show that you know the right answer.

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