this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2026
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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
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.