hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr2796.txt

Episode: 2796
Title: HPR2796: IRS,Credit Freezes and Junk Mail Ohh My!
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2796/hpr2796.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 16:57:16

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This is HPR Episode 2007-196 entitled IRS Credit Freezes and Dunk Mail Oh My.
It is hosted by Operator and in about 12 minutes long and Karima Clean Flag.
The summary is IRS Credit Freezes and Dunk Mail.
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Hello and welcome to another episode of Hacker Public Radio with your host Operator.
Today we're going to be talking about credit freezing, credit monitoring,
and the effects breach briefly and how to kind of get yourself a little bit more secure
as far as your personal identity goes.
So if you haven't heard the Equifax breach was quite a hit to many hits that we've had
over the course of a few years to people's privacy, the problem with all this
and I'll take some notes from a dark web episode that they did on this.
But if it's a podcast, it's actually pretty cool.
They have a segment about this whole thing.
What ends up happening is a lot of these services when you do opt into them
or authenticate to these services such as Trans Union Equifax,
it's Experion, Lexus Nexus, all the big ones when they authenticate you,
they're using information that they already know about you to authenticate.
And other third party services use that same type of information to authenticate.
So for example, you're in some weird bank and you're taking out a loan somewhere
in online loan or whatever and maybe you have to fill out a questionnaire
before you can authenticate or get loan.
Those questions are, I don't remember the term that he used in the podcast,
but they're kind of like reversed security questions.
And so they have a bunch of information on you and based on those answers,
they know what if you're talking to the right person.
So they'll ask you from what I can tell, at least with Experion, Trans Union and Equifax,
they will ask you questions that are answers that'll false,
that will set you up for failure, and then maybe one of them will be right.
So for example, you'll have a multiple choice of one out of four answers.
And there'll be five questions or maybe four questions.
So out of these four questions, they will have, or five questions,
they'll have four answers and one of them might be correct.
And the other ones are usually false from what I can tell.
So that right there gives you an indication that it's not quite the best of ideas
because if you know by percentage wise, I'm not a math guy,
but if you know by percentage wise that three of the answers are most likely going to be not true,
then you basically have a 30% chance to get it right within guessing three to four to five times
after you get, before you get locked out.
So when you authenticate to these services, they will ask you those questions
and say, for example, and they'll say, you took out a loan for a car on this date
or you lived in Wyoming for three years or whatever.
And you know that you didn't live in Wyoming, so you're going to answer that as none of the above.
So from what it sounds like, not a 33% chance, but you know one out of five or one out of four chance,
you're going to get actually a passing of the indication,
which has some concern on its own merit.
So if you look for basically opting out, you can Google, the easiest thing to do is Google the Clark Hour article on this.
And it will explain how to get to the websites for Transunion Equifax, Experion, and how to opt out.
I had issues with the automatic opting out of Experion, I think.
And they kept telling me that I was wrong and I didn't know who I was, which is quite hilarious.
So I'm going to have to paper opt out of that one.
And also the podcast also mentioned to set a pin for your IRS account,
which incidentally those same types of questions are the same ones you use to set the pin and or reset the pin,
which I guess is better than nothing than not having a pin at all, I don't know.
So in that regard, I haven't done that piece of it yet, but I have frozen two out of the three,
and I'm looking to do some more opting out as far as information sharing and doing some more opting out of,
or credit monitoring or free credit monitoring services.
So in the wake of all this breachy stuff, Equifax Transunion Experion all agreed to give away free credit monitoring at the end of the day.
It literally took an act of Congress to make that happen for us.
So if you've ever heard that joke, it took an act of Congress to do X.
It literally took an act of Congress to allow people to have control or at least some appearance of control of their own personal data.
So in that regard, it wasn't too much of a bad process to set that up.
He's password managers for all that.
And the idea is that it's supposed to have monitoring on there.
And the reason I'm making this post is that I got my first alert from Equifax.
And I was like, ooh, it says, you know, making a large purchase question mark.
And I thought, oh, maybe someone's trying to query my account to make a large purchase for a loan or something or try to look at my account.
Well, it ended up just being spam anyway.
So I gave me the idea to do a quick little podcast about this and give my feedback where I'm at the process and, you know, some of the frustrations that go along with that.
You know, there are other services out there that will help you protect your identity and like wife lock and all that types of things.
I mean, at the end of the day, it's kind of a mixed bag.
I don't know what practices keep you more safe or less likely to have your identity stolen.
I, to my knowledge, haven't had my identity stolen, but then again, somebody could charge, you know, two, three, four hundred dollars to my account.
And I wouldn't even know about it. But what I have done and what I would suggest is have two checking accounts.
One checking account is basically your main checking account that you share with your spouse.
And that that account is shared and is not used for anything super important except for or only used for super important things like a loan or paying off your house or whatever car payments, anything like that.
And even then, if it's under, you know, five hundred dollars or so, I still like to use a kind of internet checking account.
And this internet checking account is still connected to the checking account.
And you can actually add the option to have overdraft protection in it, which half defeats the purpose of the account itself.
But what I try to do is keep mint.com alerts set up for those accounts.
And if they dip under a certain amount, you know, 10 grand or not 10 grand, who a grand or so that will automatically deposit more money in there or manually deposit more money and they're not automatically.
So the idea there isn't that checking account is attached to a credit card.
And that credit card is attached to the safe quote unquote checking account that's not connected to the main accounts.
So for example, if that checking account were to be compromised from a PayPal issue or a PayPal, you know, perspective or maybe somebody is able to access that account, it's only going to be have a few thousand dollars in there at the end of the time.
And that I feel like that limits the exposure from an identity perspective.
There's nothing you could do about somebody opening up credit or credit card or whatever, but from as far as people stealing money, physical money from you.
I feel like if you can minimize the accounts associated with for all instances, purposes, shady transactions, you can kind of minimize that risk of getting your whole entire bank stuff compromised.
So we've been rolling with that. I have been sent.
I mean, over the course of, you know, I'm approaching an old age now, 38 almost.
Excuse me. And I haven't had to my knowledge any identity theft issues.
I don't write a lot of checks. And to my knowledge, my wife hasn't had any identity issues.
We don't travel a lot anymore at least. That might have something to do with it. But really, I purchased a lot of things online.
I use the credit card for the checking the internet checking account a lot.
And I wouldn't be surprised if that credit card number is breached on a weekly basis based on my knowledge and doing pen testing for, you know, 10, 15, 20 years, whatever.
I would say that credit card number is compromised on a weekly basis because I put it everywhere. I put it when I order something.
It's for PayPal. I use it for steam. I use it for every kind of any account.
And at the end of the day, you know, we're in theory, not liable for those charges if we keep track of them.
But at the end of the day, if they do get access to that account, you know, worst case scenario, you're looking at a couple of grand from there.
I use that to minimize and I don't know how effective that is from a vulnerability or risk perspective.
But, you know, I felt like really, it felt really gross to have my checking account associated with a bunch of, you know, weird internet websites or donation sites.
I use that for two. So you mean, I think that's what I'll also all say about that.
If you have any suggestions, feel free to post in the show notes. I would like to have something else, other free service or even a cheap service.
You know, I'd be willing to pay maybe $3 a month for some kind of enhanced credit reporting monitoring, some kind of query based to know when people are looking at my credit and things like that.
So we're pretty much set with our finances. So we only have the house payment. So we could actually block our credit down and be pretty pretty safe from there.
And as long as we're not making a big purchase or anything like that, we don't have a big issue with any of that.
So if you have any ideas about a free or cheap service that, you know, might cost $3 a month for each identity, I would like to set that up for myself and my wife just to get an idea of how, how nasty all this stuff is at the end of the day.
But there's a great podcast out there for on dark web about the IRS issues and how 150 accounts were attached to the same email address and, you know, the IRS has been in a body human body deficit and resource deficit for decades now.
So what better target than the IRS to attack because there's lots of money there that's backed by the government and your taxes.
So when they get breached and guess what? Who pays for that? You do out of out of your pocket because it goes to taxes and, you know, at the end of the day, that money gets pulled from somewhere else that's essentially still your money.
So it's something we need to be cognizant of and, you know, these companies get breached. They end up making money for a short time.
And the only losers are the people that they have their data of and that you can't get rid of that data because it's data that they collected and, you know, that's that you never told them that they could collect, right.
But that's pretty much it.
And I might do another segment once I get maybe some feedback on this one and find any more services that kind of protect, protect, help your identity and see if something's going on.
And things like last pass will tell you and have I've been poned is kind of synced up to last pass and we'll tell you here, excuse me.
Internet identities are compromised to things like that. But other than that, I don't really know of any good identity monitoring services that can do that for you.
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