Just learned that the social security database is not de-duplicated, meaning you can have the same SSN many times over, which further enables MASSIVE FRAUD!!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 9, 2025
Your tax dollars are being stolen. https://t.co/hSZdNY4wxf
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If you've ever had any experience with Lexisnexis' Accurint, it's not uncommon for people to have multiple SSNs associated with them; the SSA does seem to make a lot of mistakes.
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That's if someone is r-slurred and needs to get a new one due to identity theft or something.
I think he is confusing this with you can give the same SSN to multiple people.
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Not always - sometimes it'd pull up multiple people (without deceased indicator) for the same SSN. I'm not agreeing with him that it's intentionally fraudulent, but it would make sense to dig deeper into why those inaccuracies exist.
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Yeah, it seems like Musk is saying that as a matter of fact we're reissuing SSNs to different people for some reason. Obviously we shouldn't be, but I wouldn't be too shocked if this happened sometimes.
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I'd imagine there's a lot of typos and middle names and shit but I'd be surprised if there's more than a handful of cases of the same person pulling two social security checks.
Like how would you build up two parallel employment histories over decades with two different SSNs?
@JimieWhales love sucking peepee for SSA data access almost as much as Musk do
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Agreed; I'm more inclined to believe it's just a ton of fatfingering on the SSA's end than rampant intentional social security fraud.
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SSNs were fricking never designed to be unique identifiers, r-slur.
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What's yours then?
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None of your business. But up until recently the fricking leading digits represented a fricking geographic area (and some leading numbers were not fricking allowed), so there was a fricking fairly limited number of them and they would have to be reused at some point. Even now that they are fricking randomized, at least half the fricking numbers have been assigned. There's less than 100 years until we run out.
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That's a fricking pretty short time frame actually. And it's probably even shorter because it assumes a fricking constant population growth.
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They are just going to add more numbers.
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Good luck with that. All software that made assumptions about SSN format will be fricking broken.
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