Orlando, Fla. (Ivanhoe Newswire) — Your social security number is used for many things: your taxes, getting loans, opening a bank account, getting a passport and getting a driver’s license. But one of the most important uses of it is to verify your identity when you try to do any of these actions, but if your social security number gets shared or stolen, anyone can be you.
About 26 million Americans get their identity stolen each year, how can you make sure you’re not one of them?
“You want to be very careful with how you share your social security number to any sort of institution that might need it for, financial information or for background checks or things like that,” said Kevin Moran, PhD, Assistant Professor of Computer Science, Cyber Security and Privacy Cluster, University of Central Florida.
So, who should you be giving your social security number to?
You should only be giving your social security number to your employer, your bank, your college, and to government agencies. That’s it! And the way you give it out is equally important.
“What you don’t want to be doing, for example, is emailing your social security number in an unencrypted email to somebody,” said Moran.
No one who needs your social security number will ever go to you for it. The Office of the Inspector General recently released a scam alert about scammers asking for your social security number in order to get your 2025 cost-of-living increase. So, if anyone asks for you social security number by phone or email, contact the person or business directly with a phone number you researched yourself.
If you believe you’re a victim of identity theft, go to identitytheft.gov to start your report and see other steps you can take to recover your identity.
Contributors to this news report include: Marcy Wilder, Producer; Bob Walko, Editor.
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Sources:
https://review42.com/resources/identity-theft-statistics/
https://www.socialsecurityintelligence.com/what-social-security-numbers-mean/
https://blog.incogni.com/identity-theft-statistics/
https://www.legalmatch.com/law-library/article/who-can-ask-for-my-social-security-number.html
