Google's payment systems regularly require me to regularly re-identify myself to them at the "picture of passport" level. No other online payment provider has this problem with me.
.2 The passport office, on my last renewal, required surprising-to-the-clerk, mysterious, time-consuming, additional checks with a system in DC.
(🧵)
Two weeks ago, becoming a signer on a small business account at BMO: no problem. Yesterday, same at BOA: at great mystification to the bank's systems guy, my SSN was rejected repeatedly and eventually they said they couldn't put me on the account until they saw my actual SSN card.
Recurring pattern: unclear if the humans involved (bank clerks, Google folks, passport) can't tell me because it's secret in some way, or simply because it is so rare they don't know.
Same systems sometimes confuse me with my dad (Jr.)
I am boring enough that, other than generic online EFF-style civil libertarianism, there shouldn't be any criminal or similar records (though I've never done a FOIA to confirm?)
My dad was told by the passport office in the 1970s that Carlos The Jackal (about dad's age/appearance) once used a pseudonym similar to Luis Villa.
@billseitz American immigration :) his grandfather, “I”, passed before they emigrated to the US, so when “II” and “III” entered the US together, II → (null) and III → Jr. So at my birth, in the US, I got the numerically accurate IV but my dad never “fixed” Jr.→ III.
(Note that none of I-III ever used those numerals; that’s an Americanism. My son, returning to that, is Luis but not V. We screwed him a different way by giving him a hyphenated last name and raising him on his middle name…)
There is someone in Florida with the same name and birthday as my wife, and who apparently strives to live up to stereotypes of Florida. This occasionally causes similar things.
@luis_in_brief Do you do anything in crypto? It's not uncommon for a FinCEN flag to get set if an account tied to you touched another flagged address in some way and they attach that association to your real identity through kyc at an exchange.
The passport thing I have not heard of before, could it be an identity theft thing?
I don't think I've been the victim of any identity theft, other than generic "of course everyone's everything has been hacked". I wonder if maybe at some point I turned on some extra identity protection in some of the credit monitoring systems? But one would hope that would trigger problems for both banks 😬
@luis_in_brief maybe something related to Tidelift and US/West sanctions against Russia, Iran, Hamas. not saying you are involved with latter, obvs, only that if there is unkbeknownst to you a sanctioned individual or entity with same name it might trigger extra scrutiny behind scenes, that a vendor has to act on lest they get in legal trouble. In the last week a new batch of sanctions went into effect or at least got signed into law
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