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September 9, 2016
Q. The moral of this story might be: Be wary of making documents with a valid ID number, even when clearly labeled a sample. What happened here?
A. It was 1938, three years after Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act into law, and a wallet manufacturer wanted to encourage customers to use their new wallets to carry their Social Security cards, says Dan Lewis in his book “Now I Know More.” Bad idea, as we now know. His idea was to include a fake card in their leather products, clearly marking it as a “specimen” so the new purchaser would know it was not a true Social Security Number (SSN). The problem was that in fact it was a valid number — 078-05-1120 — that of his secretary Hilda Schrader Whitcher.
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