> They started using the number. They thought it was their own. I can't understand how people can be so stupid. I can't understand that. Another possibility is

> They started using the number. They thought it was their own. I can't understand how people can be so stupid. I can't understand that. Another possibility is that people deliberately used the number knowing that it was fake (or knowing that it belonged to someone else). Why? I can't imagine many reasons: - distrust of this weird new Social Security program that was started just 3 years earlier, so they gave this fake number to avoid participating in this fraud or scam - distrust of the federal government, esp. since the U.S. was still in The Great Depression and some people felt that Roosevelt was turning the U.S. into a socialist state, hence use of a fake number to avoid creating a socialist state - people who had restarted their lives under a new identity (which was easy to do in an era where jobs paid cash and nobody needed real ID) -- to escape a spouse, the police, a criminal past -- would not want to get an SSN under their original name - people living in the U.S. illegally were being asked by their employers for their SSNs, so they found this handy number to use - people who were eligible for a genuine SSN but hadn't bothered to get one were being asked by their employers, so they gave the fake one