No. of Recommendations: 4
The letter has a number of suspicious assertions and open-ended requests for confidential information; requests commonly seen daily in my email spam box.
Scam artists have been getting increasingly skilled in their...spoofing...of real entities. This smacks of such a thing.
One response would be to look up the phone number or email/snail mail address of the SSA ombudsman and advise that person and ask for advice, doing the look up on the SSA Web site. The emphasis here is to look up those contact data, not rely on the contact data in the letter. It's important to not respond to the letter itself in any way. I've never had occasion to do that, so I don't have those data available.
Eric Hines
