My "wife" gets a free pass

[jackfaire]

Apparently companies will give any and all information even adding said person to your account without your permission if they claim to be your wife or husband.

This quite frankly pisses me off. We live in an age where identity theft is rampant and one of the easiest ways to fish for information is to claim close familial relation.

I hate that I am going to have to call every company I do business with and specifically tell them not to share information with someone claiming to be my wife.

[Greenday]

Surprisingly, it happens with my dad and college. I know when my sister was in college, my dad would call her college (even though he wasn't helping with it at all) demanding information and since he's my sister's dad, they'd just give it to him. I mean, once you hit 18, your information is supposed to remain private unless you specifically say otherwise. So why these stupid loopholes?

[jackfaire]

One of my concerns with this is that for example if you set up an account for yourself and add another person as also responsible for it those companies will notify the other party that they were put on there. However if someone adds themselves to your account the same company will not notify you of this.

[DrFaroohk]

Welcome to social engineering 101. I've even been fooled and I'm paranoid about everyone. One time at work I gave out a co-workers phone number because the person claimed to be a family memeber and it was a dire emergency. Stupid, I know.

[joe hx]

Strange, after I turned 18 I had to sign things in order to let my mother have access to anything medical since I have depression.

[jackfaire]

Strange, after I turned 18 I had to sign things in order to let my mother have access to anything medical since I have depression.

Your supposed to be protected from anyone being able to do this but some companies take it upon themselves to violate the law in order to help you have someone get the information that you would clearly want them to have.

[Boozy]

I can't believe the number of times I've been able to use the "I'm his wife" line.

Our utilities are solely in my husband's name, but I tend to deal with things like bills and service changes. At no point have I had to get Mr. Boozy to call for me.

If anyone at any point had said, "I'm sorry, but the account is in Mr. Boozy's name. He'll need to call himself" I would have said that I understood and had him call later on. But it's never happened.

[gremcint]

Used to work for a phone company in billing, you'd be surprised at how easy it is to bypass this stuff.

To transfer accounts we need to speak to bother parties with both validating the account, however all I need is a friend who'll help and one of your bills and I can put the bill in anyone's name I want.

I would validate the account saying who I was, say I give permission to transfer the account and then have the other person call and transfer the account.

I could cancel, switch, increase, decrease, your services any way I want and maybe even get away with it completely.

But gremcint, what about putting a password on my account? won't that protect me?

No. If you don't recall your password then we VALIDATE AS THOUGH THERE IS NO PASSWORD. so all the password does is save you a little time and save you having a bill.

But gremcint, isn't there the option of voice verification to protect my account? Won't that stop fraud?

Nope. You can use the voice verification to skip validation but if you don't then we just VALIDATE AS NORMAL.

But gremcint, is the phone all that important, I mean it's not like they could use that to get other information on me? Won't that protect me from having other services conned as well?

Well actually after validation I can go ahead and confirm any detail about the account that has been given to us. So if you gave us: Employer, Billing vs living address, emergency contacts, SIN number (SSN for americans), driver's license, health card, and the same for all of any other people on the account.


So here's some advice, forget having a password, go with the voice verification. Have notes put on accounts for anyone who should or should not have access. ALWAYS HAVE YOUR BILL FOR THE LOVE OF GOD. give information that people don't have very often, don't give stuff you care about other people getting. you could also memorize your account number.

And finally, keep your bills in a safe place or shred and burn them.

[crashhelmet]

We deal with a lot of SCs because of the verification we require. We won't give out any personal information regarding a customer's account or make changes to it without it being verified first. It doesn't matter what relation they claim. If you try and tell us the account holder is dead or deployed, we require a power of attorney form faxed to us.

More often than not it leads to the person on the other end of the phone yelling and screaming at us because we won't give them a password or any other details.

We'll troubleshoot for anyone that calls in, but if it requires sending a tech out or replacing hardware, we have to speak with the account holder and they must be verified. This too causes issues if it's not who we're speaking with.

Your mom opened the account for you and she lives in another state? I'm sorry, but for privacy, security, and contractual reasons, she needs to call in.

We will add other people to the account if the verified account holder gives us permission, but otherwise they're screwed.

CH