Interesting article in today’s New York Times:
Though most people think of identity theft as a financial crime, one of the most common forms involves illegal immigrants using fraudulent Social Security numbers to conduct their daily lives. With tacit acceptance from some employers and poor coordination among government agencies, this practice provides the backbone of some low-wage businesses and a boon to the Social Security trust fund. In the 1990’s, such mismatches accounted for around $20 billion in Social Security taxes paid.[.]
In immigrant communities, most counterfeiters invent Social Security numbers at random, choosing only the first three digits to signal the card’s state of origin, prosecutors and investigators say.
This, of course, points out one of the issues of using Social Security Numbers as de facto national identity numbers. The numbering pattern is widely known, and there is no self-validation of the number. At a minimum, the number should include a couple of check digits (characters whose values depend on all the other characters in the number), and maybe some alpha characters dependant on the individual’s name and/or gender.