I have been ripped off by an interstate moving company before so I am aware of the problems. Movers usually figure out some way to extract more money after they take your stuff. I liked the demo site except the differences between the low and high quotes for the different classes of services was wide. Is that based on a common weight and volume comparison? Is there another reason for the gap?
Quotes can vary widely from one provider to another, hence the ranges. Right now we are using predictive pricing based on historical data, so that also can create wider ranges. We are working on integrating with pricing APIs which will make the pricing real time.
Moving companies probably have the largest gaps, with quotes sometimes being $10K+ different between two moving companies. That's fairly typically, so those ranges will always be wide.
The comparisons are based on a common volume. I'm happy you asked this because a lot of people get taken advantage of by simply not evenly comparing options on a volume basis. You're primarily paying for space when you move. We eliminate the room for error by always comparing options on an even basis.
If you need a high level of trust, you can use identity verification services like BlockScore. We see it used when the cost of fraud or misrepresentation is high enough to justify the cost and hurdle of participation. The hurdle being collecting the required information from trusted users. If you want to know more, see blockscore.com.
I have also seen others like Nextdoor use address for verification. If you have a locality-based service, that is a low-cost option that will likely also weed out bad actors because a credit card with valid billing address is required.
I'd not heard of blockscore.com, thanks. In Googling for a reputable UK equivalent, I noticed that the UK government has decided to roll its own solution "Verify" for its online services [0] previously mentioned on HN [1]
I'd considered postal addresses, similarly to how Google sends (used to send?) codes on postcards to verify ownership of addresses in Maps. Obvious problems with this are (1) time; and (2) it verifies access to a location rather than identity.
A valid credit card, verified with a micropayment a la PayPal, might be a potential way forward. But charging people obviously puts them off, even if it's a token amount.
They have a direct relationship with Equifax and TransUnion, two of the major credit bureaus in the US. That is where the identity data comes from.
The first phase is to verify your identity by matching it against an authoritative data set, likely a credit file at either Equifax or TransUnion in this case. Once that data is matched, a set of questions from that data is generated. Your identity was likely matched against someone with similar identity information, hence the odd questions.
Do you a similar name to other people in your household? The good news is that the question set verifies you against the information it fetched. If you are not, you should fail the question set.
We at BlockScore provide an identity verification and question set service. Properly tuning the service to match the right person takes a lot of secret sauce because there is a lot of imperfect data. Thankfully we have this working well.
I had this happen to me. The hacker used freecreditreport.com (Experian) to pull a credit report using the information an old employer leaked. They took the information from my credit report and tried to change the address of my credit cards to a UPS store mailbox and get new cards issued.
Fortunately one card was with a credit union that gave me the fraudulent address. I filed a police report in the jurisdiction where the UPS Store was located. Nothing came of the compromise, but at least I had a record if something happened later.
I also got the email address of the hacker from freecreditreport.com, but it was useless. The only way I found out that my credit report was pulled through freecreditreport.com was due to my employer (not the leak) getting employees accounts with Experian as a perk. When I contacted Experian, the rep noticed I had two accounts, one through my company and one through freecreditreport.com.
I got mail from Experian containing an access code to activate "my" account. Apparently, this guy failed the standard credit report info test so they sent postal mail to the address on file to ensure he was legit. He wasn't of course, so I got the postal mail.
Glad he failed. I have had my identity stolen several times including fraudsters trying to file bogus state and federal tax returns. I cannot complain too much; all that I learned from that got me into the identity business.
Thankfully in my case, the fraudster failed the knowledge-based authentication questions that the bank asked when he attempted to change my address and have a new card issued. I suspect that is what happened in your case too.
We do work with document collection/verification systems to verify information extracted from the documents. You still have to verify the information that those systems return against watchlists and other database, and BlockScore is the easiest way to be compliant. Send me an email and we can chat about your specific needs. support@blockscore
BlockScore founder here. We considered it early on but found that our customers are phasing out collecting identity documents if they have not already.
Great read! The cloud services on the Sidekick worked so well that T-Mobile would routinely tell customers to hard reset the phone when even a minor issue occurred.
That was all great until a storage area network upgrade failed and destroyed all data for many customers. When those phones stopped synchronizing, T-Mobile recommended a hard reset. That meant the data was gone forever.
I remember that day with sadness, and still miss my sidekick five years later because it did so many things right. I was on BART to visit some friends, lost signal, and did what I normally did when things acted up and reset my phone...only to come back to having lost all my contacts, my emails, everything. It was very frustrating to say the least.
