Originally Posted by
studentff
Yeah, and one of these commercial verification schemes (maybe even was Chase) started asking me incredibly personal questions that I was uncomfortable answering. I was nearly on the verge of hanging up on the person, and told them that. They were starting to ask questions about my parents' years of birth, whether I was related to a person with a full name including the same last name as me, etc. It was all very disconcerting. IMO they have no business trying to get me to reveal information about other people to verify myself.
Alot of that info is public knowledge and is derived by data mining. A member of my family works for one of the credit card companies and he says the amount of info that is commonly available about an individual is scary.
I once applied for a credit card over the phone and they started asking me multi-choice questions such as previous address, cars owned, etc. I did not like that one bit.