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Jim Schoenleber, a former cop who built a security-guard business here into a 2,000-employee regional powerhouse before selling it to retire to a fishing lodge, has come out of retirement to launch a dot-coin venture that helps consumers know if someone else is using their Social Security number.
The new venture, CheckMySSN.com, uses a Web site to offer consumers an instant online report showing how their Social Security numbers have been used, says Schoenleber, its CEO. The site, at www.CheckyMySSN.com , went live early this week. Using the site, consumers can pay $4.95 for a report that provides just enough information to know if someone is using their Social Security number, but not enough for the report itself to be used fraudulently, Schoenleber says.
He says he got the idea for the business from work being done by Argus-Search Inc., an arm of his former Argus Services Inc. business that he sold off in pieces in late 2003. He sold many of the assets of Argus Services' security-guard business to Securitas Security Services USA Inc., a unit of the Swedish conglomerate Securitas AB, but separately sold Argus-Search, which does pre-employment background checks for employers, to its manager, Jeannene Kurtz. He later married Kurtz, now Jeannene Schoenleber, and the two run Argus-Search together today.
That company, which is located at 18303 F. Corkin Place, in Spokane Valley, has about 400 national clients and employs eight people. Schoenleber says he noticed that a surprising number of the people Argus-Search did background checks on turned out to have multiple names attached to their Social Security number or whose names didn't match the Social Security number they provided. lie then studied 1,000 such searches the company had...