Is Pension Benefit Information (aboutmyletter.com) legitimate?
"I have no personal knowledge of this company; I've only looked over what I found on the web.  Overall, my judgement is that Pension Benefit Information, Inc. of San Rafael, CA is likely legitimate and aboutmyletter.com is one of two sites run by them (the other being pbinfo.com). These two sites are registered to Pension Benefit Information, Inc. (aboutmyletter uses Network Solutions privacy service but gives the company name; pbinfo uses their name and San Rafael address.) They are in the BBB.  The president (of the 8 employee Co.), Susan McDonald, has testified (PDF on .gov site) before Congress about business uses of SSNs.  They made a (very schlocky) video, which has an interview with McDonald after several canned, generic, ""impressive"" introductions.  I found the interview convincing of a person actually running a small, real business of this type.  A short version is on their site, long version here. There are some queries about their legitimacy online (like this one), but I found nothing negative on them, and one somewhat positive. One article talks about the suspicions they run into when contacting participants, and has some advice.  Also, scammers are unlikely to pay the U.S. Postal Service money to send paper letters. So what are the dangers? Money or identity.  So don't pay them any fees (now or later), especially since it looks like their clients (retirement funds) pay on the other side.  As for identity information: What's in the letter?  Don't they show that they already know a bunch about you?  Old employer?  Maybe the last four digits of your SSN?  Your address (if this is not the forwarded-by-IRS type of contact letter).  Other things, maybe?  What information would you be giving up if you did respond to them fully? You could try contacting your old company directly (mentioning PBI, Inc,), although on their website PBI says you'll have to go through them.  (They probably get paid for each successful contact, and deserve it.)  Still, responding through mail or telephone to PBI seems like the reasonable thing to do." To boil down what mgkrebbs said: Yes, you should send back the form, provided that it doesn't ask for any more information than address, current telephone number, and email address.  Don't ever, ever provide any bank account information. Nor social security number unless you're absolutely positive of the validity of the requestor. Phishing via regular mail is very rare.  It's way expensive compared to email, which is basically free, plus the U.S. Postal Service takes mail fraud fairly seriously (and has the legal statutes to prosecute).   So: don't obsess; send the form back.
While the standard measure of inflation, the CPI, has [severe problems](https://www.forbes.com/sites/perianneboring/2014/02/03/if-you-want-to-know-the-real-rate-of-inflation-dont-bother-with-the-cpi/), there are still a huge range of inflation statistics from the various M values to specific commodity prices. Regardless of the relative value of any of these, stealing pension funds is immoral, evil, and destabilizing. First, the annual report is just that, a snapshot that shows value at the beginning and end of the period. Beginning = Aug 08 = $105B End =       Aug 09 =  $89B Newsletter date May 10 = $96B Odd they chose end of August as it's not even a calendar quarter end. The $16B was market loss during that period. Nearly half of that seemed to be recovered by the time this newsletter came out. The balance sheet also has to show deposits and payments made to existing retirees. I haven't looked at the S&P numbers for those dates, but my gut says this is right. The market tanked and the plan was down, but not too bad.  Protect? The PBGC guarantees pensions up to a certain limit. I believe that in general, teachers are below the limit and are not at risk of a reduced benefit. You do need to check that your plan is covered. If not, I believe the state would take over directly. I hope this helps. I can ONLY WISH this would happen to me.  Get every scrap of information that you can. DOCUMENT DOCUMENT DOCUMENT..and then get a nice sleazy lawyer to sue the collector AND your employer if they leaked anything... Plain and simple,  it's illegal and there are very nice protections in place for such. Definitely sounds like scam. Odds are are high that the page he gave you the link to is a fake and this app is pure identity theft. Run away, unless you are interested enough to do the work to check with the company and confirm this is legitimate.  Nobody contacts strangers with this kind of story without it being a scam. The fact that this one sounds shady is an attempt to keep you from questioning it too closely. Think about it: if it was at all legitimate, couldn't he find a friend of a friend? If it sounds too good to be true, it ain't true. Never download software unless you know exactly where it is coming from. It could be anything from ransomware, to something that first steals all you financial info, then uss you mail account to send a similar pitch to all your friends, to a botnet that uses your machine to attack other machines. "I think you're right that these sites look so unprofessional that they aren't likely to be legitimate. However, even a very legitimate-looking site might be a fake designed to separate you from your money.  There is an entire underground industry devoted to this kind of fakery and some of them are adept at what they do.  So how can you tell? One place that you can consult is FINRA's BrokerCheck online service.  This might be the first of many checks you should undertake. Who is FINRA, you might ask?  ""The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) is the largest independent regulator for all securities firms doing business in the United States."" See here. My unprofessional guess is, even if a firm's line of business is to broker deals in private company shares, that if they're located in the U.S. or else dealing in U.S. securities then they'd still need to be registered with FINRA – note the ""all securities firms"" above. I was able to search BrokerCheck and find SecondMarket (the firm @duffbeer703 mentioned) listed as ""Active"" in the FINRA database. The entry also provides some information about the firm.  For instance, SecondMarket appears to also be registered with the S.E.C.. You should also note that SecondMarket links back to these authorities (refer to the footer of their site): ""Member FINRA | MSRB | SIPC.  Registered with the SEC as an alternative trading system for trading in private company shares.  SEC 606 Info [...]"" Any legitimate broker would want you to look them up with the authorities if you're unsure about their legitimacy. However, to undertake any such kind of deal, I'd still suggest more due diligence.  An accredited investor with serious money to invest ought to, if they are not already experts themselves on these things, hire a professional who is expert to provide counsel, help navigate the system, and avoid the frauds." I work for a hedge fund, not wealth management, but I assume that client information is treated similarly. Misplacing it is a huge deal. The company will probably need to formally investigate it and inform all the clients involved. Even if they can prove that no one looked at the information it's going to make clients question the company's procedures. I could see it being a firing offense,depending on how many clients were affected and the nature of the data. Sorry if that's not what you wanted to hear. I can verify this as well, my password is on there and I use LinkedIn, though it does look like it is an older form of the password I used to use, meaning that this is at least a month old, I forgot exactly when I changed my password, but it was recent. "I wouldn't trust ""about.com""; they're based on grabbing content from other places and are entirely unreliable. You can use the money transfer on PayPal, or transfer through a bank. I wouldn't give my bank account details to complete strangers, though. But that's me, with my distrust of the human kind." "Yeah, it is probably best to keep away from Meyer International. It is apparently connected to some kind of business called ""Royal Siam Trust."" If you do any online research about Royal Siam Trust, the words ""scam"" and ""fraud"" seem to appear an awful lot. The name ""Richard Cayne"" comes up as well. Not a good sign....." One can never be too cautious when when choosing a financial adviser. For example, has the company your adviser claims to represent ever been sanctioned by the local financial authorities? Does your adviser reside in the country in which he purports to operate? Have you thoroughly researched his background?  It is also important to bear in mind what venues a company uses for advertising - if the company resorts to advertising by spamming, then their overall business practices are likely unethical and this could lead to trouble down the line.  Finally, one should also research how the company's clientele has been built up. Was it through word of mouth or was the client data acquired by other means? This is almost surely a scam.  Among other things: It seems smart to me to have a profitable business with a troubled future take today's profits to pay tomorrow's biggest expense. Those pensions won't be ignored when USPS is bleeding even more profusely in the future and the Government will have to bail them out; these payments only soften the blow.   The pension payment requirement only serves to make the long-term effects of the USPS poor retirement choices apparent today rather than later. Do you have any support for the statement that IL pensions are 'among the most generous in the entire country'.  When last I looked at some data from an AEI study ca. 2015, IL wasn't toward the top.  It isn't the terms of the pensions as much as fiscal mismanagement in funding them. Why would anyone listen to someone else's advice? Because they believe that the person advising them knows better than they do. It's as simple as that.  The fact that you're doing any research at all - indeed, the fact that you know about a site on the internet where personal finance questions get asked and answered - puts you way ahead of the average member of the population when it comes to pensions.  If you think you know better than the SJP adviser (and I don't mean that aggressively, just as a matter of fact), then by all means do your own thing. But remember about unknown unknowns - you don't know everything the adviser might say, depending on your circumstances and changes to them over time... I would lean towards taking the lump-sum too if that were my situation. However, the value of the sum offered is likely lower than the value of the pension plan would have paid out - otherwise how would it be any advantage to offer it?  So, uncertainty about receiving the benefits is reduced, but you're still likely taking a loss vs what was promised. It's better then the pension plan going completely insolvent and paying nothing, but no reason for celebration either.