Just got notice someone hacked my super-private data from the govt...what can I do?

Cowboy

I just got a letter from the U.S. government that my personal data were among those stolen by hackers. The information they stole was for a security clearance, so the hackers have basically every piece of information on me:  all my demographic info, every address I've ever lived at, the names of all my relatives, my mom's and grandma's maiden names, all my schools, etc. Even digital images of my fingerprints were stolen.
This isn't just someone stealing my social security number; the thieves could probably get into almost any system or account of mine with what they have. I've been given a phone number to call to talk to someone, but I have little faith it will do me any good. What can I do to protect myself and find out if someone is opening accounts with my credit history?

SaigoTakamori

OPM and DSS are on it.  Go to the website and enroll.

RebuildingHusband

The credit monitoring bureaus are actually pretty good at what they do. If you have no intention of opening anything any time soon then you can put a hold on all new account activity through them. I don't remember exactly what it's called but do a little searching and you'll find it.

From there, credit cards and bank accounts almost all have zero fraud liability these days so you won't have any issues there. They work hard to prevent that because they're on the hook for all of the losses. 

International accounts are your only real risk and there's never been much you could do there so I wouldn't worry unless you do a lot of international travel. 

SignorePillolaRossa

happened to me to
just follow the directions

Crashaxe

The thing that can happen that is far more scary than someone using your credit is someone using your information to duplicate your identity, and ending up getting warrants against them.

Then one day out of the blue, you get pulled over for a defective taillight and the cop comes back up to your car, tells you that there is a warrant for your arrest, arrests you, places you in cuffs, and sticks you in jail for the night or several.

The best thing you can do to prevent this is to carry a copy of an official report or paperwork with you. If you can't get an official report from OPM or DSS, I'd make an information report with the local PD and keep a copy of that report with you for the next year or so.

It sucks that you need to do this, but I have seen identity theft happen many times, and it really does have the potential to land you in jail. Carrying that paperwork with you will raise enough doubt that if the officer has any brains (a questionable thing these days) he will err on the side of caution and let you go. I'm going to list just a couple of stories about the times I dealt with stolen identities below.

I had a guy I pulled over whose roommate stole his identity, and got warrants out for him. The warrant said, basically, "arrest John Jones Smith. Do not mistake for John Jones Smith."  It was the weirdest warrant I had ever seen. Same hair color, same eye color. No scars, marks, or tattoos to eliminate the guy I had on the side of the road from being the guy with the warrant. Everything matched. Then the guy I had told me his story, and he seemed honest. He said that he had been detained for hours on occasion because of his ex-roommate's warrants, and been arrested twice, spending 3 days in jail on one occasion.

I could have hauled the guy in for fingerprinting, and lodged him in the jail to wait for extradition to a different state, but chose not to as it was for a non-violent warrant, and I would rather let the guilty guy go than accidentally arrest the innocent one.

Another time I arrested a guy for DUI and cited and released him. He didn't show up for court, and a warrant was issued. A guy with the same name showed up at our PD asking why he had a warrant. I was asked to go down and ID the guy to see if he was the guy I pulled over. He wasn't.

He was lucky he hadn't been pulled over, as he would have definitely ended up in jail as the driver's license was a completely valid DL issued by DMV, as I'll explain below.

The innocent guy was playing pool in a bar, kept his DL and credit cards in his shirt pocket, and they fell out when he bent over to take a shot. Someone sent everything back to him by mail the next day, and he thought nothing of it. In the meantime, the guy who found the guy's DL pulled a birth certificate on him, went to DMV, said he lost his license, and walked out 10 minutes later with a valid but false drivers license.

Since the guy at the PD wasn't the guy I arrested, I got the warrant lifted, and hunted the bad guy with a vengeance. Fortunately the bad guy had a passenger with him, and I used the passenger, the bad guy's girlfriend, to track the guy down. She covered for him, but I went to her parents and leaned on them to give me the bad guy's real name. I spent days hunting the bad guy down. I doubt anyone else would have taken the time to hunt him.

If I hadn't have worked hard to nail the bad guy, he could have kept on using that fake DL to get in more trouble.

My wife's identity was stolen. Someone ran up a bunch of instant credit charges at Best Buys and similar stores in GA, and then made a fake drivers license in a different state and actually flew cross-country from LA to Atlanta on it. TSA after all doesn't run DL's through the system. They just look at them and make sure the name on the DL matches the name on the ticket. That goes to show how TSA is just security theater, but I won't go into that. I could rant all day.

No warrants came out in my wife's name out of that, but I had my wife carry a paper copy of the State Police report for a year in case they did.

ID theft is so pervasive, and it is so hard to find the bad guys, that nobody does anything about it. Nobody. I tracked the one guy I arrested for DUI down mainly because I was pissed that he had fooled me, and I had given him a break by not lodging him in jail that night. It was personal to me.

I know this is probably the last thing you wanted to hear, @Cowboy, but forewarned is forearmed. The trouble of carrying a few pieces of paper with you for the next little bit to ward off the rare possibility of ending up in jail for something you didn't do is well worth it.

redheaded_woman

@cowboy Just stopping by to say holy shit you didn't need this and Internet stranger hugs!!!

Frank_London

If you're talking about the major government breach from a few months ago (and I think you are), then it's not criminal "hackers" who've got your data, it's a certain foreign government.

They're unlikely to rack up restaurant bills and vacations to the Caribbean in your name.

mrsozzy

I just got this notice too. It's in my maiden name,  so it must be from a background check from 18 years ago.

PhoenixDown

Yeah, I got that too. I don't want to be a part of this exclusive club. 

SignorePillolaRossa

PhoenixDown said:

Yeah, I got that too. I don't want to be a part of this exclusive club. 

not all that exclusive, actually ... more identities are in that database than trees in Maine

RedPillNeophyte

SignorePillolaRossa said:

PhoenixDown said:

Yeah, I got that too. I don't want to be a part of this exclusive club. 

not all that exclusive, actually ... more identities are in that database than trees in Maine

Awww, I wanted to be a special snowflake!

dalef

I got the notice, too. Unfortunately, I've heard the company that got the contract for the security breaches isn't very good. (The one that got the contract for the day-to-day OPM breaches is.) OPM had very poor security. But, yes the US government has said that a foreign government had the data.