I spent some of today writing change of address letters to businesses we deal with, per the E911 project. But they don’t accept these requests over the phone anymore. Grrrrrr. Seems like we must spend too much overhead for security these days, because though I had all the information they would have cared to ask to verify my identity, they still demanded letters be sent. What a pain. 
True, a person issuing a written letter might less likely be a faker. But how much less, and is that enough to justify inconveniencing perhaps hundreds of thousands of people a year by forcing them to write letters? I think not, because the more info requested, the more reliable the over-the-phone approach becomes. At some point then, the added security of a physical letter shrinks to near mootness. I mean, if I can accurately supply my SS#, old street address, mother’s maiden name, PIN, the name of my family’s first pet, birthday, account number, the dollar amount of recent transactions, the name of my bank, AND, if I’m calling from the phone number registered to the account besides, then the odds are, in my opinion, acceptably high that I’m legit. I’m not sure that sending a letter additionally proves my identity much better than giving the above information over the phone. In fact, if I was an unscrupulous hacker who knew all this information, spoofing a letter would be child’s play. Further, since the letter must typically include the information listed above anyhow, it poses a security risk in and of itself; a would-be criminal could intercept it, and then, they have complete access to my account.
Some argue that the US mail is more secure than the telephone because of the stiff penalties levied against those who tamper with the mail. But it’s also a federal crime to tap (a form of tampering) the phone lines. In fact, breaking into a phone line to steal the information would require more technical aptitude than lifting a letter out of some one’s mail box. So this is less likely to occur.
On a company being able to demonstrate the reasons for an address change with a paper trail: Most every bigger business currently, including the one I was working with yesterday, record these calls, “for quality and training purposes,” they say. So proving that they had impetus to execute the change would be easy if it ever came to that.
I will concede that paper verification adds A DEGREE of security to the process. But I’m not convinced that this extra manual effort makes things all that much more impervious to intrusion. So I doubt that any extra peace of mind is worth the effort. In fact, I’ve carried tens of accounts of various types through the years from credit card and utility accounts to store charge cards, retirement accounts, 401Ks, and checking accounts both business and personal. Yet never have unauthorized parties changed my address on said accounts, even back when telephone address-change requests were honored more. So while I believe, in this age of identity theft that we must be careful, I also feel that companies have gone too far to secure their customers and their accounts. The result is needless inconvenience to those customers.
Seems to me that with today’s technologies, effectively verifying someone’s identity over the phone should be simple, and that the letters requirement was just someone’s knee-jerk reaction to security threats; letters that really don’t work all that much better (if at all) than more modern and less time-consuming telephone techniques.