Yesterday, I wrote about two researchers at Carnegie Mellon University who uncovered a way to predict an individual's Social Security Number based upon his or her State and date of birth. This discovery casts down upon how secure Social Security Numbers are and has tremendous implications for the study and prevention of identity theft.  This news likely does not make you very secure, but how would you feel if your Social Security Number were printed and sold with wallets?

Social Security Numbers were all the rage in the late 1930s.  Ushered in as part of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's famed 'New Deal', by the end of 1937, over 37,000,000 had been handed out.  In 1938, a wallet manufacturer from New York (E.H. Ferree) decided that they would sell more wallets if they showed customers how a Social Security card would look in them.  So, they printed up sample cards and started inserting them with wallets.  Sounds like a good idea, isn't it?

Problem is, that number (078-05-1120) belonged to Mrs. Hilda Schrader Whitcher, who worked as a secretary at E.H. Ferree.  It starts to get even more comedic.  You see, despite the fact that this sample card was half the size of a real card, printed all in red, and clearly marked 'specimen', many people started claiming that number as their own.  In fact, at its peak, over 5,000 Americans claimed that poor Mrs. Whitcher's Social Security Number belonged to them!

Everything worked out in the end - the Social Security Administration figured out what happened and promptly voided Mrs. Whitcher's number (and issued her a new one).  However, despite a fair amount of publicity, people kept using that number for decades after the sample cards were producted - in  1977, twelve people were still using good old 078-05-1120.

(source - http://www.snopes.com/business/taxes/woolworth.asp)