free magazines and identity theft
Today I received a call from the people at Computing magazine. This magazine is quite a good read and, rather splendidly, they send it to me for nowt because I work in IT. Unfortunately, to continue getting the freebie, I have to put up with a regular conversation with a call centre worker full of questions about my job and the organisation. The questions are a bit silly, e.g:
Which of the following networking technologies do you use: TCP/IP; LAN; WAN?
Can a local area network really be described as a “networking technology”?
Anyway, after all this silliness comes the final question where I’m asked something more personal. Today it was, “what is the name of the last school you attended?”. In the past I’ve had various questions, for example: “what size shoe do you wear?” or “where were you born?”. They claim to need this information, to prove to their advertisers that they have truly spoken to me.
I really don’t like being asked these questions. Firstly, I don’t see how it proves in any way that they have spoken to me. Secondly, this is just the sort of information that fraudsters use to steal your identity. After answering several such phone calls to get assorted free magazines, someone consolidating the responses could discover a myriad of useful little nuggets of information about me. Presumably, shortly afterwards, I would start to receive strange bills and find my credit rating plummeting. It all seems rather irresponsible.
Anyway, I always grill them over why they want such personal information and then, because they insist on some sort of answer, I lie.
So for the future reference of any fraudsters out there reading this, here is my personal information:
| Place of Birth: | On the Royal Navy destroyer HMS Gloucester, patrolling somewhere in the southern Indian Ocean. I can’t give the ship’s precise location for reasons of national security. |
| Age: | 13¾ |
| Mother’s Maiden Name: | Cunningham-Smythe |
| Shoe size: | 3½ |
| Last School: | Mrs Grimston’s Mountain School for Wayward Boys, Arequipa, Peru. |
Can I have my free magazine now?