SOMEONE USING YOUR SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER? - WHAT TO DO? - PART ONE

At KnightsBridge Castle we run an exhaustive check against over 85,000 databases for every client who subscribes to our services. More than 30% of these searches reveal that our clients Social Security Number (SSN) has been compromised – that is: someone other than the client has used the SSN either in error or to commit crimes.

Use of a SSN by another person is all too common. This unauthorized use falls into a spectrum of usage patters. The simplest unauthorized use is what our case specialists call the “one hit wonder”. In the most complex cases we find that a professional identity thief or professional criminal has used the SSN for a long period to commit a wide variety of crimes. Another all too common unauthorized use of the SSN is false employment.

In the simplest unauthorized use, we find that the SSN appeared in our database search at a single point in the past. Often this “one hit wonder” occurred years ago, perhaps on a utility application, and has not appeared again. In many of these “one hit wonder” cases the original applicant for the utility services probably wrote his SSN in error although fraud may still have been their intent. A second example of the “one hit wonder” is the transposition error. Transposition errors are fairly simple to detect. In both of these simple cases, some investigation is required, however continued monitoring of the use of the SSN is often all that is recommended to the client.

At the other end of the spectrum the unauthorized use of the SSN is the result of a professional criminal activity. In situations where professional identity theft is detected, our case specialists (using a variety of database tools) will seek to identify the person using the unauthorized SSN. With the power of our eye-spy™ system we are very successful at identifying many of these offenders.

In these criminal cases a specific set of activities must be taken to stop the criminal activity. We will discuss this specific activity in a part two.