According to SSA they have issued under 500m SSNs and they are not reassigned after death. How have BILLIONS been found?
To add to this: less than 1B US citizens have ever existed since the founding of the US - estimable to about 500M-600M
this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2026
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The article says more clearly "2.7 billion records with Social Security numbers." The author goes on to say he found 4 records with a friend's data but in those 4 records were 3 different SSNs. He called the friend and confirmed that one of them was his actual SSN. I guess someone was auto-linking names and SSNs for ID theft purposes and getting it wrong sometimes.
Its probably a mix of SSNs and EINs, there is no limit to the amount of EINs you can have. Except for the fact they will only issue one a day to a person.
If this is US social security numbers, they only have 9 digits so there can't be billions of them.
How exactly do you have "billions" of Soc Sec numbers when they're nine digits?
Around 450 million numbers have been issued, but each series is comprised of 9 numbers. Therefore 4.1 billion numbers have been issued. I'll be here all week.
They get recycled. Not saying this isn't hyperbole, but it's the fact that those numbers are attached to legal names (even if the person is deceased) that's problematic.
All Americans should have frozen their credit years ago.