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I have seen what happens with garbage-in/garbage-out in databases, so this kind of stuff terrifies me. I often think of a case where we had a person listed twice in our database, with same address, birthday, etc, only thing different was gender, and last 2 digits of SSN were transposed.. After we 'fixed' the issue a few times, they BOTH showed up to our office. Both Named Leslie, born on same day, a few small towns apart, same last name and home phone since they had been married. Back then, SSN were handed out by region sequentially, so one had the last two digits 12 and the other 21. |
They were born in different years. Their SSNs were not close. For one of them the name was her maiden name. For the other, a married name. They went to different colleges and had different credentials. They did live in the same town.
When my aunt died, all the credit companies and collections companies tried one of two recovery tactics. Some tried to make her brother pay the debts as her surviving spouse. The others tried to assert that the debts were incurred by his wife and that the mismatch of other data in their own databases was evidence of fraud.