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by adrr 3210 days ago
All financial companies are required to have you SSN for reporting income for taxes and also report money movement under the anti-money laundering laws(AML). Know your customer(KYC) requires a financial company to gather documentation and information to verify your identity and to ensure your not on any list of people we're legally not allowed to provide services eg terrorist watch list.

You don't need to provide a SSN to get cell service or provide real information. Lots fraud is done through tethering through burner phones.
2 comments
bigiain 3210 days ago
Seems KYC as used in the real world doesn't do a very good job of verifying whether the "customer" is Alice or the fraudster... It'd be nice if _that_ requirement had enough teeth to reduce the ability of the financial institution to claim Alice is "the victim"...
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adrr 3210 days ago
Curious how would you verify a user? Right now standard solution is to use public records(LexisNexis), credit history(Experian), fraud detection networks(early warning). Along with a bunch reputation providers around IP(Maxmind,Socure), email(emailage), address. Also government based ID and utility bills etc. This isn't cheap and can costs $10+ to run all these checks.

Even government can't verify people and its problem because people give other people's SSN and DOB when they get arrested which is the worst type of identity theft as it can lead to the victim getting arrested or not getting a job(criminal record showing up in background check).

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user5994461 3209 days ago
You ask for their ID card or passport. If you want credit history, you ask for their last year tax sheet.
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perlpimp 3209 days ago
how about having photo on the credit file. this would solve so many problems.
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freeflight 3209 days ago
> You don't need to provide a SSN to get cell service or provide real information. Lots fraud is done through tethering through burner phones.

Don't give them any stupid ideas. This year Germany did exactly that: Require proper identification for purchased SIM cards. Lot's of people used that opportunity for some extra cash by selling pre-activated SIM's through Ebay, after the requirements had been changed.

Too bad they also introduced Euro roaming, so people are still free to buy their anonymous SIM's in other EU countries and use them in Germany.

I guess those are the consequences of a future where your mobile device is used for your personal authentication everywhere by everybody. [0]

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/13/business/dealbook/banks-l...

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