When my wife worked in HR hiring in a warehouse with high turnover illegals would simply make one up and if it was real, their system flagged it as ok. There was nothing she could do to stop it.

Someone tried to open a bank account with my husband’s SSN and after that we put a freeze on both of our numbers.

My FIL received a notice from the IRS that someone was using his number and so now he has to go through some hoops when filing taxes, I don’t remember exactly. It is a pain in the neck, my husband winds up helping.

Not that I know of, but how scary that somebody has been able to use yours and yet you’re told that they can’t do anything about it! Are you not worried that they could ruin your credit or at the least run up your credit balance?

@Blackwater_Park which makes me ask this question… How are social security numbers generated? I always assumed they went in numerical order but then that would mean that any number lower than a certain sequence could be randomly given for identification.

@LifeQuestioner https://www.einvestigator.com/social-security-numbers-ssn/

No but seven years ago, my wife did our taxes online and the last step was complete. She went to send it and it came back I was dead. The IRS tax office It could be corrected by going to local Social Security office, made an appointment, no go they had no control over the error. It took six weeks for a corrected feed was made. Apparently the SSI numbers for 10,000 people were erroneously declared dead.

RIP Willie. ;( how does one even come back after dying 10,000 times?!

Not that I know of. But Rick was a victim of identity theft once.

Not to my knowledge.

But the SSN is a shitty identifier – just numbers, no check digits, no built in security, so it’s surprising that it persists as an identifier.

Compare the SSN to your medicare number – my med number has 3 alpha letters interspersed. Better than utter lack of security in an SSN.

@LifeQuestioner I’m lucky in that I have a unique name. There’s only one person on this planet with my name. As such in order to ruin me a crook would need my mane and my SSN. Also I have LifeLock watching over me.

Not that I know of.

I use Identity Guard to inform me if that happens.
They informed me about a massive data breach at National Public Data, which included the personal info of about 2 billion people.

I consequently froze my credit access at Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion.

Potentially.
My little brother actually has a life, to steal. Someone got ahold of his SS number, and I’ve NEVER seen him SO mad.
He’s far more chill, than me.
He wanted to hunt the person down. I was like, “they could be in Hyderabad”...

Social Security never mention anything. Only one time years ago did it seem someone may have used my card for employment but then years later it didn’t appear when I asked for a record of my employment. So hard to say if maybe it was someone had one wrong number written. I honestly think most of the time its just human error when inputting numbers.
The same for credit agencies. They still occasionally mix up my sons birthday and social with my husband because they have the same name. Even mess up my daughters with mine and we don’t have the same name but same initial on our first name. I have to constantly point out that the aliases have different birth days. It helped a great deal after she got married and changed her last name. Its laziness most of the time.
They can’t be bothered to see that middle names are different or birthdays. They just write it up as aliases.
For the social I had to explain that the person was working on the west coast and I lived on the east coast clearly and working here on the east coast. They said they needed me to come in to show proof of my identity but I couldn’t take off work at the time and forgot about it. Years later its not even on my work record. I assume the other person noticed they had written the wrong number and corrected it. The name was even different.