Social Security Numbers For Sale

Fri, Aug 22, 2008 at 7:00:00 am PDT

• 

By Sarah Smith

News broke this week about seven Panda Express employees in Tucson who weren’t legally allowed to work in the United States…so they obtained stolen social security numbers (SSNs) and worked for several years anyway until they were caught.

This type of crime raises new concerns about privacy issues because the fraudulent use of a social security number for employment only is extremely hard to detect because it won’t appear on your credit report. In fact, you may not ever know about it at all unless the IRS comes calling and asks you to pay up on the taxes owed for your “unreported income” (which is really the income earned by the identity thief using your social security number).

Now I know the system is flawed. If the social security office assigns a person a number they should run every use of that number against that person’s name. But, they don’t. So, where fixing a broken system might not be an option for us, successfully navigating a broken system definitely is. One way you can be proactive about protecting your social security number is to hire a professional service to monitor it.

Purchasing a product like ID Secure might greatly increase your peace of mind as well as the level of protection guarding your identity. For just $12.99 a month a professional identity monitoring company will use advanced web crawling technology to search the internet and public records to make sure that your social security number, credit and ATM cards and other personal information isn’t being fraudulently used in any way. ID Secure makes sure your identity is being monitored 24 hours a day seven days a week helping to keep it safe. If fraudulent activity is suspected, you will be informed immediately. You can learn more by clicking here.

Social security number monitoring could potentially be an invaluable service since the buying and selling of SSNs makes an already unsafe world trickier to navigate.

So even though there are many free things you can do to protect your identity, those alone might not be enough. The first month of ID Secure only costs a dollar, and in my opinion—that’s a dollar well spent.