Infuriati Anonymous

hehe. funny
I'm glad to know I'm not the only person to have got into an argument with a call centre person over those 'verification details'.
One of my (least) favourites is,
call centre drudge: "what's your phone number?"
Ironic customer (me): "It's whatever you dialled to come through to me"
ccd: But you have to tell me, its for verification purposes
ic: but you just dialled it
ccd: no I didn't the computer dialled it
ic: well its the number on your screen
ccd: but its for verification purposes, to prove who you are
ic: well you might be any tom dick or harry
ccd at this point gets confused and irate and the conversation goes down hill. Chuckling doesn't do much to calm them down either.

Another old chestnut:
ccd: What's your date of birth?
ic: What's yours?
The my don't like that much.

And they really hate this one:
ccd: Look, mister, if you don't tell me then I can't talk to you
ic: Not my problem.
 

You're exactly right. It's a problem I call Asymetric Authentication, and until the banks address it, they're training their customers to fall victim to pretext calls, phishing etc.

I wrote a paper about it last year, with some security guys from Denver. Surprisingly, it didn't go anywhere.