An Invitation to Give away Your SSN and Credit Card Number

StolenIDSearch

It looks like a new service from TrustedID came out recently. This service allows you to check if your social security or credit card number have been compromised.

I understand that many users will be interested is such a service. But I have a also some problem with it :

1. If your credit card or social security number has been stolen, there is a good chance that you will find out quite quickly. Most of the time, people who stole this information will not wait a long time to use it. So sooner than later, you will get a call from you bank of credit card company about some weird activity in your accounts.
2. This is an invitation for criminal to setup similar looking sites and send out spam to invite people to verify if their SSN or credit card number have been stolen. Victims will easily fall for it and will give their numbers to criminals.

While we may trust TrustedID not to store nor use the information we input on their site, they do have a database with all the compromised information. So if someone stole that database from them, they get more than a handful of information that can be use to steal someone identity.

I believe that these kind of services should not be available online but through you banking institution. My bank already offer me, for free, a service that notify me of any activity on my credit report. So if anyone try to get credits in my name, I will now it very soon. My bank already have these information, so I don't have to give it to someone else to benefit for such a service.