I'm disgusted. How would one go about ensuring that their social couldn't be used to create an account with this much liability? Would freezing a credit line be enough?

Prosecutors have no interest in "justice." They are measured solely on conviction rates. If she's convicted, she will go through needless life-destroying suffering because of this. But at the end, it will be overturned after the prosecutors in question have been elected to Congress or a governorship. And then lawsuits will ensue. And that's why BS like this will never stop.

Someone opened up a PayPal account in my name a few weeks ago using an old address. I canceled my PayPal account years ago because I was afraid of it being linked to my bank.

It took an hour to get past the AI who kept hanging up on me. I’m more concerned after reading the article.

I'm feeling paranoid now and wondering if the best defense is to proactively open accounts with Cash App, Venmo, whatever other stupid peer-to-peer wallet apps exist, just to lock down my identity and be in control of it. I'm not sure if locked credit and monitoring would work here because these services probably don't do credit checks or show up on reports anyway.

That is one defense for having an open system, but that only affects services who use these systems. The article doesn't mention if CashApp actually used her social to check credit, or just took the attackers' word by checking if the SS was valid and provided credit.

The other problem is that there isn't just one credit system, there are 3 major ones for general consumer credit, and other specialty ones (Innovis, etc; I had a list somewhere but can't seem to find it; AI might be a friend here).

I've heard someone mention using Chexsystems but I'm not sure if that's available to ordinary consumers or how you'd be able to just go and do that. Or if it would show something like Cashapp.