[jstarfish]

Stealing someone else's unused SSN is not synthetic identity creation, it's just fraud. There is a living person associated with that SSN, even if they are off the grid.

Synthetic identity fraud involves you making a bunch of inquiries with completely fake SSNs and squatting on them for a few years, maybe bringing them out of cold storage every so often to make a few more inquiries to keep them on the credit-building radar before you ultimately qualify for actual lines of credit and do a bust-out. There is no oblivious meatbag being used as a patsy-- the identities are completely fake, which is what makes them synthetic.

[drablyechoes]

There is more than one way to construct a synthetic identity, but in most cases that I've been aware of, a stolen SSN is used to construct the totally fake identity.

Using a completely fake SSN instead of a stolen SSN is what distinguishes "synthetic identity theft" from "synthetic identity fraud".

The identities in both cases are completely fake, but only in the identity theft case is the synthetic identity backstopped by a legitimate SSN that belongs to a real person somewhere. If that real person is a child or "off the grid", then the CRAs have no idea who the real person is and their SSN is ripe for creating a synthetic identity that will probably go undetected for years.