I was told by a friend and I also researched a company online named SCN Solution and the company states that a Secondary Credit Number or a Credit Privacy Number is totally legal (based on the 1974 Privacy Act) and that you do not have to use your Social Security Number when applying for new lines of credit with auto loans, credit cards, or home rentals even if it remains that your main line of credit is bad. Is this legal?
Are they legal, yes. Are they useful, Not really.
Here is the part of your comment that is wrong "that you do not have to use your Social Security Number when applying for new lines of credit with auto loans, credit cards, or home rentals." The problem is the application will ask for your SSN (which it always does) and you don't provide it or use a CPN, you have committed fraud in the application for credit. You can have these numbers, but the lenders are not required to use them.
You can have these numbers, but they really aren't worth anything. They are NOT a way to create a blank credit slate or have a separate credit identity.
Mr. Berkus gives you good information. I would never recommend someone get either of these in order to apply for new credit. There are companies out there that will sell these numbers to people that want to mask their own bad credit history. But if you apply for credit, and the application asks for your SSN, you are committing fraud if you put in anything other than your SSN. Also, how do these companies come up with those numbers? The FTC says some are SSNs taken from children, and even those that are deceased. Hope this helps. Good luck with your decision.
There have been some recent changes to the credit scoring system that make these methods less than effective aside & apart from the issues involving the legality of these methods. If your goal is to restore your credit, you need to be looking at cleaning up your mistakes and doing better with credit in the future, not skulking around with criminals who are scamming you. Hope this perspective helps!
