How did people in the past prevent identity theft? I mean before the photos and new secure technology on identity documents were available?
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Back in the olden-times of the 70’s-90’s, when you used a credit card, they used a “ka-chunker” (as everyone seemed to call it) a heavy device that you set the card in and laid a 2-part paper form (originally with a carbon paper layer, a thin sheet of black carbon, before self-carboning forms were developed) over it. You swiped a heavy platen across the mess which made a “ka-chunk” sound, and gave the card and the form back to the purchaser.
That’s why credit cards had/have raised numbers and names – the platen “bruised” the carbon paper and imprinted the card data physically on the paper. The customer signed the stacked form, and then you tore off a copy as the buyer’s receipt of the transaction.
It was important that you not just toss the customer copy, since it had your full CC number and name on it. I had a friend who’d troll through the airport and dig those out of the trash and use them to purchase stuff, somehow (I think he’s been in jail forever, kind of an idiot). That was really a primary form of ID theft, and the solution was to physically protect those sheets and destroy them properly.
Other ways were if someone got hold of your checkbook, they could write checks at places not hardcore about IDs; if someone intercepted or stole a check made out to you, they could endorse it and cash it (happened to me when I forgot my jacket with a check in the pocket); some people would go to churches and find birth and baptism records of people who had died young without a social security number, get those birth certificates, and create fake IDs with them. It was much more about gaining access to paper documents back then.
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