I know a thing or two about unemployment. I got laid off last year and that made me eligible for California’s lavish unemployment benefits. So we’ll use as our thought experiment someone who’s trying to fraudulently obtain unemployment benefits from the state of California by leveraging a dead-but-alive Social Security Number (SSN). How would one go about successfully executing this scheme?
To be eligible for unemployment in California, you have to prove to the state that you are a legal California resident and that you worked for a California employer. We can already see a bit of a wrinkle here – not just any “dead-but-alive” SSN will do. You need to find one that belonged to someone who worked in California. So how do you do that? SSNs aren’t exactly super private these days, so you could scour obituaries or other sources of death information to find candidates for your scheme, and buy their personal info on the dark web. Then you take your candidate list and compare it the Death Master File (DMF) from SSA and hope to find someone who isn’t in the DMF (i.e. is dead-but-alive). But the DMF isn’t available to the general public, you have to be certified before you can get it – and getting that certification isn’t going to be easy even for an exceptional fraudster. There is a publicly accessible dataset you can use – it’s a subset of the NUMIDENT database (the source for the DMF) searchable via the Access to Archival Databases (AAD) tool from the National Archives5. There’s a problem, though – it only contains death information from 2007 and earlier. But let’s say you clear all these hurdles and find that sweet, sweet SSN of a dead person (let’s call them “FNU LNU”) who has no date of death in the NUMIDENT and who was employed in California. You’re all set, right?
Well, no. You still have to convince the state of California that you are the person with that SSN. I can assure you that California will not just take your word for this. They have to verify it. They use a service called ID.me for this purpose. You give ID.me a selfie and a photo of your ID (we’ll call this your CDL, for California Driver License). Let’s assume that ID.me only has access to California DMV records and credit reports (they have more, I’m sure). The CDL you give ID.me will have to match the DMV records: same name, same address, same DOB, etc. Ok, so you might think you just have to forge a convincing CDL with that info and your picture. But there’s something you need that you can’t get from NUMIDENT or from an obituary – the number of the CDL itself. Not only that, but the CDL also has to be current – an expired CDL doesn’t qualify. Your forged CDL may show it’s current, but when ID.me compares that with DMV records, they’ll see it actually expired. Not surprising, as most dead people don’t renew their CDLs. So now you need to update the DMV records. so you’re going to have to go to the DMV, claim to be FNU LNU and tell them that you want to renew your CDL, but you lost your original one, and you can’t remember the number. Among other hurdles (you might be asked for proof of address for example), when you go there the DMV employee will pull up your DMV record which, as you may guess, includes your picture. So this will only work if you got really lucky and FNU LNU happens to look enough like you to fool them. If you can pass, you’ll get a new CDL with your picture and FNU LNU’s info. And then you’re done!
That’s all it takes! (Not really – I left out a bunch of stuff, in reality it’d be harder than this.)
All of the above is going to take time and money. And it’s very risky – the penalties for this kind of fraud involve going to prison. Is it worth it? The maximum benefit you can get from unemployment is California is $450/week for six months (26 weeks)6. That’s $11,700. This hardly seems like a sure fire path to a life of leisure.
So let’s get back to what Musk said. Is it possible that people are using the SS data discrepancy on dead-but-alive people to sink a “bank shot” and fraudulently obtain unemployment payments? Sure, it’s possible – after all, anything is. But it sure seems unlikely that it’s happening at any meaningful scale, so reasonable people would want some additional information before accepting such a claim.
Add new comment