I saw an apparently authentic local post on Facebook from a woman who received a call from someone in law enforcement. She had apparently missed a jury summons, and the official was trying to help her sort out the mess. He asked her about her address (turned out to be an older address) and knew her occupation, told her to meet him somewhere.
Something seemed odd to her, called the police and established that no one by that name worked for them, may have dodged a kidnapping attempt.
To make an incoherent and possibly bogus story short: this felt to me like a possible outcome from the Equifax data breach. Random stranger knows your (previous) address, knows what you do for a living, knows your phone number. There could be even worse outcomes than identity theft from this.
A more more direct anecdote: I just got a replacement social security card by mail. All it took to do it online was information from my credit report.
Thanks to this breach, the only defense against someone getting my social security card fraudulently is that it has to be mailed to my current address.
You can put a credit freeze on you file in major credit bureaus - this way their website would not be able to verify answers on security questions and deny login.
Brian Krebs did a good article on the process placing a freeze on your file [1]
Something seemed odd to her, called the police and established that no one by that name worked for them, may have dodged a kidnapping attempt.
To make an incoherent and possibly bogus story short: this felt to me like a possible outcome from the Equifax data breach. Random stranger knows your (previous) address, knows what you do for a living, knows your phone number. There could be even worse outcomes than identity theft from this.