zlacker

>>mecred+(OP)
1. Author lost me at his first sentence: "Like most people, I’ve had my identity stolen once or twice in my life." I am careful and aware of this possibility, but AFAIK I have not experienced this, nor have "most people" I know. o_O Crazy times.

2. I don't even understand how a title transfer could happen without verifying ownership. Is the title system in the USA decentralized or that much different than elsewhere? i.e. Torrens-style

>>emptyb+dq
In the dark old days before Apple Pay, where it was common in America to hand your credit/debit card to some rando at a restaurant and have them disappear with it for a few minutes, about once a year my bank would call me to ask if I'd been using my card in some far-off locale:

"Hi! Are you in Tijuana?"

"Not since 1993. Why? What's up?"

"So you didn't just try to buy gasoline at a PEMEX there?"

"Nope, I'm in San Francisco as speak."

"OK, thanks! We'll get a new card out in the mail to you."

That's a pretty low bar for identity theft, but I think it's defensible.

>>kstrau+g21
You must have been going to some very shady restaurants. I still hand off my credit card to a rando. I did it today. I did it last weekend. I've never had this problem.

>>recurs+K31
Yeah I agree. Not only do I hand off my card, literally everyone I know does so. None have ever had problems. I'm not saying that such fraud never happens, because it obviously does happen. But I don't think it's so overwhelmingly common as is being claimed here.

>>bigstr+Rj1
This source[0] is hardly unbiased, so take this with a heavy dose of "citation needed", but it claims:

> 62 million Americans had fraudulent charges on their credit or debit cards last year alone, with unauthorized purchases exceeding $6.2 billion annually.

However, that jibes with other numbers I've seen.

https://www.security.org/digital-safety/credit-card-fraud-re...

>>kstrau+wu1
That jives with the number of unauthorized transactions I've had on my cards. 62/260 million adults = about a quarter of adults each year. On average I probably average a fraudulent transaction in a quarter of the years.