A cautionary tale - one day this spring my husband got a notice from social security,congratulations, his SS would be starting at the beginning of the next month. Also on the same day, he got a debit card that he needed to activate. Trouble is, he hadn't applied for SS nor had he applied for the debit card. There was a 'tell', as he uses his middle initial, not his full middle name; all of this came with his full middle name. It was too late in the day to go to the SS office, but we did call the debit card company and actually managed to talk to a live person. Oh yes, the card was obtained at a Walmart about 20 miles away from us and was applied for by mail, to do that the person who did this had to put $20 on the card. We got that cancelled and I called Walmart security to see how hard it was to obtain and apply for one of these cards. It turns out, not that hard. Then the next morning hubs was in the SS office when it opened. He was the second one who had called for an appointment to get the same thing straightened out. Someone applied for hubs SS (back to his 66th birthday) and set up to direct the money into the debit account. He got it stopped and notified the police. SO - if you get ANYTHING strange in your mail, check it out, don't just toss it out. We still don't know how or where the information came from, credit reports continue to be clean and he check with SS every so often. Had the thief also come to our house and stolen our mail - we wouldn't have know anything.