It Looked Like Identity Fraud, But Was Actually a Computer Glitch

Holly Ramer is a reporter for the Associated Press in New Hampshire.

Back in March, she thought she might have had her identity stolen.

Well initially I did. Yeah that was the first thought I had….

Concerned and curious, Ramer dug into why she was being dunned for more than 7 thousand dollars she didn’t owe.

The money was owed on a U.S. backed loan made far away, in the Pacific island nation of the Federated States of Micronesia.

The small business administration had issued a loan to a gentleman in Micronesia and in doing so he had written down his social security number issued in his…own…country, which only has eight digits, instead of nine like American numbers but the U.S. Small Business Association computers automatically added a zero to the front of his number and that turned it into mine.

SBA officials acknowledge that their computers did indeed add zeroes to Micronesian numbers to process emergency loans.

But they say they don’t think there’s a big problem with social security number mix ups.

Our review of this situation is that it happens in a very small number of cases.

That’s Mike Stamler of the Small Business Administration in Washington.

He says he knows some Micronesian social security numbers with an extra zero mimic American numbers issued for people in Maine and New Hampshire.

But Stamler says there is little chance many people here will get inappropriate demands for loan payments.

….. the vast majority of defaulted loans were essentially written off because there were no assets. The agency didn’t have any ability to collect on collateral in these places.

Despite SBA’s assurances, the AP found that 299 loans were issued to Micronesians for disaster assistance.

And nearly two thirds of those have gone into default.

Mike Stamler of SBA says his agency is mending its files to correct the duplication that has bedeviled Holly Ramer.
So what we’ve done is we are going back through the system, the computer system making corrections to those loans that are in the system and fixing them manually. And identifying all the possible cases to do a manual fix and we’re working on a software fix to prevent it from happening again.

Victims and potential victims of this mix up can perhaps feel a bit of reassurance that the SBA is working on the problem.

But as the AP’s Holly Ramer points out, there’s no real way to know if everything has been straightened out.

As a consumer, if you ask to see your credit report its only going to show you what’s associated with your name and your social security number. So even if I try to monitor my credit report that’s not going to ever show me anything. It doesn’t show you that someone else is using your social security number.

So far, Ramer’s case has been the only one that’s surfaced with this particular duplication of a social security number.

But the AP did a comparison between US and Micronesian numbers and found there could be as many as 135 thousand possible matches.