Who else had your bank account number? (Banks recycle account numbers)

[RamboLiberal]

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/01/05/MNGPEALB271.DTL

Dennis Yu, a programmer at Sunnyvale's Yahoo Inc., learned the hard way that because banks don't have enough account numbers to go around, they quietly recycle numbers that belonged to past customers.

Most banks insist that the practice poses no danger to current customers. However, checks bearing Yu's Bank of America account number but someone else's name and address started popping up among Bay Area merchants shortly before Christmas.

Yu, 30, a Mountain View resident, found himself on the hook for nearly $700 in purchases. Those purchases, he discovered, may have been made by the person who previously held his account number.

"I had no idea this was even possible," Yu said.

[Coventina]

1. WTF? Time to call a lawyer!

Geesh!

[aquart]

2. Neither did I.

Of course, I'm still reeling from the Prada excursion my credit card made without me.

[sybylla]

3. I used to work for several small financial institutions

and we would have recycled numbers but we didn't go through them fast enough to be a problem. Heck, we were still on the original series of checking and mortgage numbers that began back in the 60's.

I imagine this is a bigger problem with big city banks as they would have the demand for new accounts. One would think that if you were going through a set of numbers more rapidly than every 10 years, you'd better come up with a better numbering system.

[merwin]

4. Who else has my account number? Anyone that I've ever written a check to.

All the information about your account is on a check... I assume they could use that to make and use checks under a different name :-)

That would probably work until they ran into someone that did electronic check processing, right?

[TahitiNut]

6. It's all on deposit slips, too - which find their way to most folks' trash

As we move further and further to 'soft' transactions and away from hard (i.e. gold, Silver Certificate, etc.) transactions, information becomes even more of an asset. The protections against identity theft are virtually non-existent. While financial institutions now 'voluntarily' offer a barely adequate degree of immunity, they do so solely as a trade-off. It's cheaper ... as long as it doesn't get to the point they can't write off the losses and pass them on to their customers in the form of increased pricing or reduced service. That prospect is foreseeable, since the perpetrators are rarely caught. Indeed, even catching and prosecuting them is an "externalization" of a cost - the public would then bear much of the cost of a business 'convenience.'

[Robbien]

5. The next rip-off will be sites pretending to help you find out

if others have the same number as yours . . . . all you have to do is give them your account number and they will check it out for you.