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The original was posted on /r/privacy by /u/lucyownz on 2023-08-24 18:54:42+00:00.

I noticed that on Telegram, there’s a bunch of bots that allow you to look up anyone’s name and city, and it’ll return their full address, SSN, driver’s license number, relatives, and much more. Some of them also support retrieving driver’s license images or doing license plate lookups.

Most of them claim to use for TLO lookups - but how do so many hackers get access to it if you have to be a licensed business? Why aren’t there precautions or checks against this sort of thing? How and why are hackers selling USIS API keys for $1500 each?

As far as I can tell, if someone has my name (or even just my phone / email in some cases), it’s pretty much game over. They could literally get anything about me and go through my records for $15 per lookup, which seems to almost make the point of caring about your privacy worthless, since even the smallest leak could result in everything falling apart. This also means you could get the SSN and address of anyone on Facebook, for example.