Basically all employers and financial services in the US use a top secret magic number assigned to citizens to identify them and create accounts. They also all use this number to involuntarily track us. The tracking services then hand out data dumps of our personal information (including the number) to identity thieves.
Now the only way to stop identity thieves from creating accounts in our name is “freezing” our credit report with the largest 3 (now 4) tracking services. If a financial service cannot look up the credit report, they won’t make an account.