OP here. Exactly! Plus, since I bought them used, the year I GOT the car might not be the year the car was made. The questions are multiple choice. You pick which one out of 4 choices is the car, or it may be none of the choices.
Since they have this mysterious list from somewhere, they might insert one car MAKE & MODEL I owned, and swap out the YEAR to be the wrong year.
So, I'm thinking loosely of when I OWNED the car, but since it's used, beat up & old when I received it, it may have been made years before I even drove/owned it. So, I'd disqualify that car & it could have really been the right car.
No, the first dog questions are usually ones on Internet websites. Where you have previously entered the info when you joined or started using the site.
When I said "financial institutions" and it happened 3 times already, I meant calling over the phone to: my own bank (see my response to RitaE below,) or opening a charge card account at a department store at the register and having to verify info over the phone that I'm really me opening the account. And yesterday, calling my stock broker.
They all DID ask questions like where I previously lived (also multiple choice and switching up
real info like the street name with
incorrect info: the city
or state are wrong.
I guess they figure all this "public record" info maybe can be gotten from background checks.
, An Identity Thief might loosely have that info on me, so they'd have part of the info, like the street I lived on, but carelessly mess up on the state, etc.
The questions are purposely designed to mess up the Identity Thieves. But, like below, some questions are so obscure, Come ON! they mess up the
real person, too.
YES! I was asked this question too! I called once at 2am, after I checked my bank account and saw charges I didn't make. So I was trying to report it to cancel my card. They put ME through all the security questions and that was one of the questions.
What month & year I opened that account. Unless I had opened it the exact day after a major event in my life, how the heck am I supposed to remember something as mundane as that?
I couldn't even look it up on my Internet account, since it doesn't list records back that far. So either I happen to have a file cabinet ready, next to my phone & I could pull out my first statement ever from over a decade ago, or have the date linked to an important event in my life.
Get this! Since I couldn't verify what date I opened my account, I failed the security test so my credit card was still usable instead of being frozen or cancelled.
I had to go to my bank the next day and I ripped them anew for such a ludicrous question.
Of course when I got to the bank, all I had to show was my driver's license. I would think an Identity Thief would have had a phony ID made up if they were pretending to be me.
Bingo! That is the whole point. The one you forgot about will be the one they ask about. Plus, it's a multiple choice question. You don't get to volunteer all your other cars. They may have that one car listed (make & model perfect) and tell you the wrong YEAR. Since it's multiple choice, it doesn't matter if you are off by one year. You got the question wrong.
Which is what happened to me yesterday. Let's just say I had owned a
used Jaguar xj220.
There are many Jaguar X- models. But, they got got the whole car, down to each letter,
so now it hinges on the YEAR: 1984.
I barely remember
anything from 1984. Wait!
Oh yes! I was driving around the beat up blue car - only because I remember my
boyfriend that year and what we drove around in.
I do remember driving the Jaguar xj220 years later. . . But wait. . . was the car MADE in 1984 and I simply drove it 7-8 years
later?
As I've said, I've owned so many different cars, some years the cars were made overlap. Some I
owned way later than they were made - when they were about to die. Unless I'm buying new brakes, the whole car make/model/year never came up. I didn't own collectible cars, where I'd be proud to know that info. If the car got stolen, I carried around the car registration in my wallet, in my purse, so I would have just handed it to the police. Life was simpler back then.
Because I had a relative who used to be a used car dealer, I've actually had many cheap cars over the years. As they broke down or wore out, I'd get another cheap one. I don't always remember the year, the make or the exact model down to the letter (literally) - which is crucial for the security question. I'm a woman! That stuff wasn't important to me. 
I used to just hand over the car registrations to car mechanics and let them figure stuff out.
- like the days I'm asked what are normally trivial questions back to 1984! 
