Creditworthiness is another area of experimentation. Equifax is teaming up with governments, both state and federal, to help detect whether citizens who are receiving benefits are truly eligible. The bureau must verify identity, state of residence, whether a criminal history exists and income level, an area where Roy says social media has potential.

Consumers may share photos of new cars they’ve purchased on Facebook, check in on expensive flights and post pictures of items they own on Pinterest, all data that may help indicate if a person is being truthful about disposable income, he said.

Fake Profiles

One problem is that there’s little to stop fraudsters from creating fake social-media profiles and fooling the companies monitoring the data. On Fiverr, a marketplace where people can sell online services for $5, one user is offering to add 50 friends to any Facebook account in 24 hours.

Enter startups such as Trulioo, which is helping companies mine social data to verify customer information and identity. A real, connected online social presence takes years to build, according to Trulioo founder and CEO Stephen Ufford. Among other sources, Trulioo analyzes data available from the Common Crawl Foundation, a cache of all publicly available Internet information dating back to 2008.

There are ways to distinguish real from manufactured profiles, Ufford said. The average social-network user is tagged by others in photographs more than 70 times a year, and members’ friends are almost always connected to one another. Diagnostics of photo albums -- whether a profile is filled with stock photos, for example -- also may eventually help detect a profile’s validity.

Real People

“Facebook has always made it so you have to be a real person, so start with that as a base,” said Braintree’s Ready. “All the richness about the things people do -- that’s hard to recreate. If you have hundreds of friends on Facebook that have existed for many years, fraudsters would have had to start many years ago and collaborate with hundreds of people.”

Another question is the trustworthiness of data originated by consumers themselves. Credit bureaus refer to social-media posts and photos as self-efforted data, or information voluntarily provided by the consumer, which can be inferior to data gathered from banks and phone companies. The problem with the user-provided information is the same as it was in 1999, when chat rooms were filled with purported 21-year-olds who were actually 12.

Even so, most people have robust and mostly accurate online presences, a plethora of information that’s available to enrich data submitted by financial institutions, Equifax’s Roy said. That’s often enough to assist the credit bureaus in spotting potential warning signs.