There are, of course, easily added forms of additional verification - for example, Stripe just added their Identity service which lets you take a picture of your driver's license and then match the image against a selfie. But that puts "friction" in front of the application process, so most banks don't do something like this unless other signals make them think the application has a high fraud risk.
If basically everyone's Name, SSN, DoB and Address is easily viewable public info, this will all change.
Shortly before BBVA closed them, I was in a back-and-forth to open an account with Simple.
First, my ID was too shiny, then it wasn't black and white, then it wasn't color, then they wanted a picture of my apartment building, then ...
it was just on and on and on for three weeks. It got to the point where I asked what exactly they wanted and they literally told me that they cannot tell me because it would allow me to commit fraud. I asked if I could talk directly to their fraud team to figure out what exactly: nope. Can't do that, they can't talk to you.
So I was expected to either read their minds or play infinite whack-a-mole with them where they say one thing in one email then say the opposite in the next.
This achievement then unlocks Privacy technology.
Currently, PII must be stored as plaintext. Required for matching records across systems.
Once UUIDs are used, all data at rest, at the field level, can be encrypted.
cite: Book Translucent Databases 2nd ed.
They have refused to provide me service if I don't give my SSN.
To get around it, I've had to open business accounts with my EIN.
That being said, you are right, there are prepaid options and postpaid with a deposit ($50) that can put you outside of this SSN requirement on T-Mobile. I guess you have to know to ask for them. It is for credit, that's the only reason they can ask for your SSN.
Everything is credit based now, and for some people their phone bill might even be their first positive (or negative) mark on a credit score rating.
I have no idea why it would be to the advantage of a business like T-mobile to get you on a postpaid plan when there is no possibility of running up your bill. It's still the option they push on hardest when you walk up to the storefront.
The credit model is the default model. That was my point. I don't know that I had a point.
You shouldn't need to maintain a credit account just to keep a phone number, but I guess it's real estate and that's valuable, they will put it back into the pool if you ever stop paying the bill. I haven't had to deal with these kind of problems myself for a long time, but the pain is still fresh.
Many places it is to prevent abuse.
I don't think I have been able yo legally get a phone number in Norway without identifykng myself for years.
Maybe if you go to a lawyer they can sort something, but that will be another league for most of us.
The best solution would be if the US introduced mandatory passports or other forms of ID cards with smartcard capability, similar to the German Personalausweis. It has a secure cryptoprocessor with key vault, meaning it can be used to sign documents (if the bureaucracy to get a signature CA wouldn't be completely stuck for years now, SIGH), but especially companies willing to use authenticated data can fetch them securely over any NFC enabled terminal. Quite ingenuous.
This would entirely kill ID fraud at the source. The problem only seems to be an aversion in some parts of the US population against ID documents.
16 And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads:
17 And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.
In addition to the sky faerie grifters, the anti-rationality mentats categorically oppose allowing government to govern.
RFID: Sign of the (End) Times? https://www.wired.com/2006/06/rfid-sign-of-the-end-times/
On social media, vaccine misinformation mixes with extreme faith https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/02/16/covid-v...
So, does Germany not have ID fraud anymore?
All of this fraud is an extension of that deregulation, which leaves people exposed. Frankly a slower moving economy is probably BETTER in the long run, but it’s all numbers and figures nowadays. People are reduced to an SSN number.
But you know that. It must be hard to be so aggrieved.
Why is obtaining an ID "intentionally designed" this way. Don't you need to get a driving license to drive? A passport to re-enter the country? Do disadvantaged groups not get driving licenses?
Because when you make the places to get them few in number and difficult to get to, then make the lines to get them very long, you create hurdles for people who have jobs that are not overly friendly towards long or variable absences.
This is intentional, much as many places in the United States have reorganized voting locations to themselves be difficult to get to. Disenfranchisement is intentional.
> Don't you need to get a driving license to drive? ... Do disadvantaged groups not get driving licenses?
Many in the United States live in urban areas where they're not required and where they may not be economically feasible. (These folks tend not to vote for the people who are pushing ID requirements.)
> A passport to re-enter the country?
The set of Americans who never have cause to leave the country is very large.
Most of the online transactions I do with my credit card in Europe require me to verify them via some approval app (often the bank's own app) before they're submitted.
But I guess it's more profitable to just let US folks spend spend spend and rack up huge debt burdens. The interest is probably higher than whatever anti-fraud efforts cost them at the moment.
Here in the UK strong customer authentication and strong proof of identity is a requirement in law, breaching it lands you in significant amounts of hot water. So at the bank I used to work at, identity theft was pretty rare and only made up a tiny fraction of the fraud we saw.
A much bigger share of the pie, and the area that we really struggled with, is customer authorised payments. The customer gets socially engineered into parting with their cash, and as a bank we're expected to reimburse them if we can't prove that we didn't take steps to detect the scam in progress and prevent the customer making the transaction.
And proper identify verification - like looking at the document in person - also has downsides. It still can be forged. Just a little harder than what we have. (Other countries with mandatory physical KYC and a wet signature still have fraud issues)
Overall I think it’s a lot of added cost and inconvenience for a slightly better benefit.
Preventing this kind of fraud is a solved problem. The reason it still happens is that banks are forced, through competition, to minimise "identity proving" burden for consumers, in a "get credit now with instant approval!" kind of way.
At the moment we're stuck in a "marketing armageddon" of banks competing with each other by not properly verifying identity before granting credit or transferring away money. This seems to me like a Tragedy of the Commons.
If, across the board, people were required to prove their identity properly before banks rely on them, then the problem would go away overnight. It'd be a bit more tedious for consumers, but I don't see how that would cause banks to fail. The cost would merely move from fraud to identity verification.
Perhaps some people wouldn't be sold credit that they can't afford, but I don't buy that such people are keeping the banks afloat. Before banks stop operating retail banking services, I'm sure they'll just start actually verifying identity properly to keep that market.