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A comment on Having trouble with the IRS site? Try all caps. Parent comment

Re:Having trouble with the IRS site? Try all caps by robomartin on Wednesday April 29, 2020 @01:00AM (#23015554)
An old college friend of mine from 30+ years ago used to write his SSN on every college book he bought. He also used an engraver to etch his SSN into every tool he owned. The SSN was't all that important back then. I can't say when it became something of potential value.

Sadly he passes many years ago. His wife called me in desperation. She needed to get rid of and donate a bunch of tools and hardware filling their garage. However, everything had his SSN on it, I mean, he had an amazing collection of Snap-on tools with his SSN engraved on everything, down to the screwdrivers.

She trust me implicitly. We took everything out of their garage and donated it to our local high school's robotics club. The caveat was: The kids had to help me grind off the SSN from every single tool they got. That was an interesting week.

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Re:Having trouble with the IRS site? Try all caps by Spooky23 on Wednesday April 29, 2020 @08:38AM (#23018346)
You wasted a week. :)

SSN for deceased people is published broadly in various forms.

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Re:Having trouble with the IRS site? Try all caps by robomartin on Wednesday April 29, 2020 @04:37PM (#23023963)
Well, I had to honor a widow’s request.
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Re:Having trouble with the IRS site? Try all caps by contravariant on Wednesday April 29, 2020 @08:12AM (#23018176)
Maybe this is a silly question, but exactly what was the risk? If knowing a random SSN is problematic then it's not exactly hard to just generate a couple yourself.
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Re:Having trouble with the IRS site? Try all caps by gt_grc on Wednesday April 29, 2020 @09:26AM (#23018823)
I used to work for a credit bureau, and a lender once asked us to build an application that could pull credit files based on SSN only. (Pulling a credit file normally requires multiple identifiers.) Fortunately, someone foresaw the very problem that you mentioned, and we declined to build it.
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Re:Having trouble with the IRS site? Try all caps by nhumrich on Wednesday April 29, 2020 @01:09AM (#23015595)
> cant say when it became something of value As soon as banks started allowing SSNs themselves instead of requiring an SSN card for establishing lines of credit.
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