The New York Times is running a piece on the ongoing scandal of criminals, by hook or crook, obtaining enough information about a person receiving or eligible to receive Social Security benefits and then convincing the Social Security Administration to divert those benefits to the criminals. It happens thousands of times a year and involves tens of millions of dollars. It goes on and on with no apparent fix in sight.
Sure there is a fix.
ReplyDeleteBan debit cards, and create a process through which records of first time victims can be locked to prevent updates without a 2nd pin or management approval. And, while you are at it, make the big megabanks and online banks financially liable when they deposit a check into an account that doesn't belong to the recipient of the check (shockingly, big banks do this all the time - you'd be amazed and sickened at how many of these fraud rings use the same accounts for large numbers of fraudulent transactions whereby the checks coming into the accounts are made out to 20-50 totally different people not on the account, and yet the banks don't bother to question it because it doesn't cost them anything to not do so).
Also, one additional reason the problem is as big as it is has to do with the fact that once a person is a victim, it often happens to the same person multiple times because the people running the agency are idiots and do nothing to prevent it from happening again (up to and including punishment to employees who change direct deposits on records that are clearly blocked because they obviously can't f@%!*&g be bothered to read remarks).
I had one old man who was victimized 3 different times in a 6 month period, and management refused to do ANYTHING to the employees involved. I eventually had to set a tickle on my calender for 8 consecutive months to checking his record on every Treasury cutoff day to prevent it from happening again, which worked because I kept canceling the changes that continued to be made by agency employees in violation of policy).
Two words: secondary authentication.
ReplyDelete@ 11:12
ReplyDeleteFormer FO manager here. What exactly should mgmt have done to prevent this, and how do you know something wasn’t done? If a caller provides enough information to identify, the employee is following instructions to make the change. I frequently beat the drum with my staff to be aware of fraudsters, but it took some keen awareness to detect these cases. It was not obvious. If I came across a case where my staff had made a change, I would always bring it up to them and ask them to be more vigilant. I could not discipline them for following the letter of POMS.
That said, the fraudsters would often call a variety of offices and the TSC, so the changes were not confined to the same staff. These are people have a great deal of inside knowledge, including the timing of the Treasury cutoff. They know the procedures and play them extremely well.
Kudos to you for the labor intensive effort to put a stop to the fraud on that one case. I know I have had to do my own tracking on similar cases where repeated and copious remarks were not enough to prevent repeat fraudulent changes.