What your SSN really means — to you and potential fraudsters

In the early 1940s, Hilda Schrader Whitcher answered a knock at her door. Waiting for her were FBI agents, who wanted to know why so many people were using her Social Security number (SSN).

As it turns out, her boss was to blame. She worked at a wallet manufacturer as the secretary to the vice president. A few years prior, he’d included a sample Social Security card in the company’s nationally distributed products. Rather than using a fake number, he used hers, and many people adopted Whitcher’s number as their own. According to the Social Security Administration (SSA), 40,000 Americans used her SSN at one point or another.

While it seems ludicrous now, many were bewildered by the new numbers. In the early days of SSNs, people tried to remember their new numbers by inscribing them on rings, and even their bodies. In 1957, the holder of the SSN 001-01-0001 even went on a game show to announce her special “secret.”

It goes to show how the SSN has evolved over the years, from a basic earnings tracker (for the purpose of retirement benefits) to a confidential identifier capable of unlocking the most secure financial doors. So how did our SSNs go from potential tattoos to top-secret IDs? And, more importantly, what’s the best way to keep yours out of the wrong hands?

The pervasive use of SSNs, from our taxes to our lines of credit, has made them a prime target for identity theft. Fraudsters can use SSNs for all kinds of identity theft, from opening lines of credit and loans, to getting medical care to obtaining tax refunds. More than 158 million SSNs were compromised in 2017, eight times the amount in 2016. According to the 2018 Capital One Credit Protection & Security Survey, 55 percent of respondents have experienced financial theft or fraud, yet only 15 percent of respondents from the same survey currently use a service to monitor their SSN.

Sarah Igo, a history professor at Vanderbilt University and author of The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America, said there wasn’t “one clear event” that led to the widespread uses of the SSN we see today. Rather, it happened over decades, as government agencies and businesses adopted it as an identifier. “It’s precisely because there was no national ID in the US that there was this desire and hunger to track people and verify who they were,” says Igo. “From 1946 into the 1970s, [the Social Security card] specifically said ‘This is not an ID.’ They finally took it off in the ‘70s because everyone was using it that way.”

Igo’s not the only one who’s noticed these inconsistencies. “The SSN is simultaneously presumed to be both secret and public,” said Jeremy Grant, coordinator at The Better Identity Coalition, at a May 2018 congressional hearing on “The Future of the Social Security Number.” “Secret, because we tell individuals to guard their SSN closely. Public, because we have multiple laws that require individuals to give it out to facilitate all sorts of interactions within industry and government.”

And this makes our SSNs hard to reign back in. “That’s the challenge we have now,” Igo said. “It’s everywhere and we can’t extricate it from all the systems that depend on it.”

While there’s no way to completely safeguard your SSN, you can be more aware of where and when your SSN is being used with a credit monitoring app, like CreditWise® from Capital One®. CreditWise, which allows you to review your credit report for signs of error, theft, or fraud, is free and available to everyone, whether or not you’re a Capital One customer. The app provides several helpful services; like the SSN tracker, which tracks the names and addresses associated with credit applications linked to your SSN; and dark web surveillance, which lets you see if your SSN or email address is found on an unsafe site, hacking forum or illegal digital marketplace, perhaps being sold online.

Monitoring your SSN can help you take action to recover your personal information, if you suspect that yours has been used with ill intent — because once your information has been compromised, it can be difficult to recover. Kat, a Florida-based freelance writer, had her driver’s license and credit cards stolen in October 2016. After canceling her cards and alerting her bank, she thought she was in the clear. But the thieves went onto a password protected site, clicked “forgot password,” and used information from her social media profiles to answer her security questions. From there, they obtained more of her personal information and sold it online. She didn’t find out until six months later, when she started getting personal loan applications in the mail. “I felt so violated and helpless,” Kat said. “I spent hours on the phone for weeks trying to dispute charges and purchases made under my name. It was over 18 months before things were completely back to normal.”

Although monitoring is a good way to slow the bleed of information, you can take other steps to protect yourself. For example, you should never share your information or SSN with inbound callers or emailers, ask businesses (like doctor’s offices) if you can use alternative forms of identification, and avoid using public Wi-Fi.

You should regularly check your credit reports to look out for warning signs of fraud. The website annualcreditreport.com offers reports from the three major bureaus — Equifax, Experian, and Transunion. When checking your reports, says Chris Gatz, the head of CreditWise, scan for any unfamiliar accounts, names, addresses, or phone numbers, and if you notice anything strange, call the credit bureau immediately. “If you think you might be a victim of identity theft, you can also put a fraud alert on your credit reports,” he says. “Fraud alerts flag your credit report and advise creditors to verify your identity before extending new credit.”

If you determine that you are a victim of identity theft, consider a credit freeze, which restricts new potential lenders from obtaining your credit report to evaluate a new credit application. This prevents everyone – including you – from opening new credit accounts. In almost all states, a credit freeze stays in place until the consumer removes it.

If you plan to apply for credit soon, and therefore don’t want to freeze your own reports, you may want to consider freezing your children’s. Since they usually won’t realize what’s happened for many years, children have become a popular target of identity theft, with more than 1 million becoming victims last year, according to the 2018 Child Identity Fraud Study.

“In a world where our information is increasingly digital, there is good news and bad news: Starting with the bad, it’s extremely difficult to completely prevent fraud,” Gatz says. “The good news is that there are a few quick steps people can take now, to help protect themselves and keep tabs on their data.” Tools like CreditWise empower everyone to take control of their personal information, by helping people detect potential fraud faster.