Pretexting
Obtaining someone's personal information by deception, posing as the person or as someone authorized to receive the data.
Full definition
Pretexting is the use of a false identity or fabricated scenario to trick a person, business, or institution into handing over information they would not otherwise disclose, for example, calling a phone company while impersonating the account holder. It is how the Docusearch broker obtained Amy Boyer's workplace before her 1999 murder. The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) criminalizes pretexting to obtain financial information, and the FTC treats it as a deceptive practice. Pretexting is the human-engineering counterpart to scraping: it fills gaps in a profile that public records can't.
Go deeper
The Amy Boyer pretexting case →Related terms
Data Broker
A company that collects personal information about consumers and sells, licenses, or shares that information with third parties.
Skip Tracing
The practice of locating a person's current whereabouts by piecing together data from many sources, originally to find debtors who "skipped" town.
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