They served their country but now the card that’s supposed to help veterans may be putting them at risk for identity theft and it’s a problem the Department of Veteran Affairs has known about for at least two years.
When the VA first issued new medical cards in 2004, they claimed the cards protected the vet’s identity. Fast-forward ten years and we found out, that’s not necessarily the case anymore.
WINK News Call for Action found that a crook only needs a smart phone and a free barcode scanner app, and then any vet with one of these so-called protective cards is vulnerable.
It took us all of ten seconds to get veteran Jim Murphy’s social security number.
Read more on WINK News, where they posted a detailed response from the VA on its plans to address the vulnerability with a rollout of new cards using a different system that does not embed Social Security numbers.