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60 Million New Medicare Cards Are Being Issued. Here’s What You Need To Know
FYI: As people across the country receive new, safer Medicare cards in the mail, advocates are warning about fraudulent callers who try to dupe people into paying money or divulging personal information.
Talk about locking the barn door after the horses have bolted. At this point I doubt that there's more than 1% of the US population whose Social Security information hasn't been compromised in one way or another. Too little, and much too late.
You know that, I know that, the whole world knows that.
Yet most financial institutions ask for the last four digits of one's SSN "for security purposes". To compound this farce, we're supposed to be reassured by the fact that they're not asking for the whole SSN. As though asking for just four digits somehow makes the system more secure.
Speaking of "security purposes", the other day I came up with a positively brilliant scheme for generating those damned security codes that every site seems to ask for, and that are impossible to remember. Unfortunately, this will only work for those of us who are old enough to have grown up with landline telephones which had alpha-numeric number prefixes.
For example, when I was a kid in SF the Yellow Cab company's number was TUxedo 5 1234. There's a great ready-made security code, complete with apparently random capitalization all built in. Thousands of telephone company central offices across the US, each with one or more discrete prefixes. All you have to remember is the phone number that you grew up with, or that of a friend or relative.
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Yet most financial institutions ask for the last four digits of one's SSN "for security purposes". To compound this farce, we're supposed to be reassured by the fact that they're not asking for the whole SSN. As though asking for just four digits somehow makes the system more secure.
For example, when I was a kid in SF the Yellow Cab company's number was TUxedo 5 1234. There's a great ready-made security code, complete with apparently random capitalization all built in. Thousands of telephone company central offices across the US, each with one or more discrete prefixes. All you have to remember is the phone number that you grew up with, or that of a friend or relative.