For as long as my wife and I have been married, I've been able to rattle off her Social Security number. It's a convenient thing to know, allowing me to fill out paperwork until she's there to sign her name to whatever document called for the number.

It turns out we weren't the only ones who knew this piece of important information.

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On Jan. 4, a woman walked into a Verizon store in Selinsgrove, in Snyder County, armed with my wife's Social Security number and our home address.

We found out about this a few weeks later when our first Verizon bill arrived in the mail. This mystery woman apparently was making the most of her newfound identity. I don't know what data plan she settled on, but she apparently chose four phones.

The first bill to arrive in our mailbox was for $497.

Fixing the problem took some effort. Repeated calls to Verizon were complicated by confusion as I moved from one painful conversation to the next about the state of my bill and why I wasn't going to pay it.

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Things moved much more quickly when I used what turned out to be the magic word — fraud.

That prompted a quick transfer of my call to a different department. The woman who answered the phone said the account already had been flagged as suspicious. When I got off the phone 10 minutes later, I had been assured that the matter had been resolved and that all three credit bureaus had been put on alert.

In short, we had escaped identity theft relatively unscathed.

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But here's the thing. That incident wasn't the first time our household had been hit with identity theft within a 12-month period. And it wouldn't be the last.

My youngest daughter, who is a college freshman, would seem like a poor target for an identity thief. I remind you that she's in college and there's not much money to steal.

That's what we thought until this past summer when she received a letter from the IRS, inquiring as to whether she had filed a tax return. Someone had filed one in her name and the IRS was just checking before issuing a refund.

This problem was harder to fix. Before she could tell the IRS that she had not filed a return, she had to verify her own identity via a video call. She had to provide documents and read numbers from an IRS letter while on camera. When my daughter paused and turned to someone else in the room for help with a question, the person verifying her identity threatened to end the call out of concern that she was being coached.

Eventually, though, it seemed that the IRS had the information it needed. That was in August.

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Then it happened again. The second letter from the IRS came March 15. A new tax return had again been filed in my daughter's name and a refund was pending.

After a 40-minute wait, a helpful agent walked her through the process for a second time. The phony tax return had been flagged.

But there was a new problem, we were warned. Going forward, my tax return, on which my daughter is claimed as a dependent, could no longer be trusted. I would have to complete a paper return and stick it in the mail.

Sure enough, when I tried to file my return electronically, as I've done for years, I received an email that the IRS had rejected the return because a return already had been filed that included my daughter's Social Security number.

I did what I should have done in the first place. I printed out my return, signed it, and walked it to the Post Office.

Now, I wait and hope that the IRS will accept my return.

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I remember getting a call from a friend more than 20 years ago, telling me he had been a victim of identity theft. I don't remember the specifics, but I do remember that it took months to put the problem to rest.

Our short talk ended with words of advice. I should be very careful, he said, to avoid the same sort of problem.

I know some of the steps suggested by the experts. They include placing a temporary freeze on all your credit accounts through credit reporting agencies. That way you'll know if someone tries to take out credit in your name.

Good advice, I guess.

But I'm still left to wonder where my family and I went wrong.

We are cautious when using a credit card to use only trusted websites, the ones that begin with Https. We allow automatic payments to be sucked from our bank accounts, but only from companies that would seem to pass the safety sniff test. And we rarely share out credit card information and Social Security numbers with strangers.

Along with the rest of the world, we put up with the chore of keeping tabs on dozens of electronic passwords, many of which need to be changed on a regular basis.

My only conclusion is that the system of which most of us are a part — this world of credit card payments and companies that store our personal information — just isn't good enough.

The Federal Trade Commission reports 5.7 million reports of identity theft in 2022 alone.

Here's hoping it gets better.

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Contact Jim Martin at jmartin@timesnews.com.

This article originally appeared on Erie Times-News: Jim Martin; Identity theft has hit my family 3 times in 12 months