Two Men. One Identity. They Both Paid the Price.

[dalton99a]

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/23/us/undocumented-worker-stolen-identity-dan-kluver.html

http://archive.ph/zjThR

Two Men. One Identity. They Both Paid the Price.
Thousands of undocumented workers rely on fraudulent Social Security numbers. One of them belonged to Dan Kluver.
By Eli Saslow
Nov. 23, 2025 Updated 10:18 a.m. ET

Dan Kluver saw the police lights flashing in his rearview mirror late last year and eased his car onto the shoulder, thinking there had been some kind of mistake. He had spent four decades in rural Minnesota without ever getting into trouble. He prided himself on a life built around dependability and routine, working at the same factory where his father once did and spending his weekends coaching baseball and teaching Sunday school. He had never fired a gun, or smoked a cigarette, or missed a payment, or been arrested.

“License and registration, please,” the officer said. Kluver, 42, handed them over and waited while the officer went back to his patrol car. He listened to the church bells that rang every hour and watched sunlight reflect off the grain silos in downtown Olivia, where he knew most of the 2,400 residents, including the officer who was walking back to his car.

“Is everything all right?” Kluver asked.

“It’s strange, but it looks like your license has been suspended,” the officer said. “You’ve got another driver’s license with some issues down in Missouri.”

...

[Nictuku]

1. A very sad story - and it is all of our faults (for not fixing the broken immigration system due to racism)

[Igel]

2. I'd say it's also the fault of the person committing fraud

and making another person's life hell. Usually because they want to have a better life ... Maybe out of ignorance, maybe not, they're willing to sacrifice others for their own good.

(Yes, that's put in about the starkest terms. But identity theft is like that--and that's what they're committing. And it makes those not assumed to be vulnerable absolutely vulnerable--that includes you and me and 300 million other people.)

The IRS back in the '80s had a nifty program that I really liked. I worked for a small non-profit and co-kept the books and such. Anyway, for a while we got reports from the IRS to help clean up their error ridden database. One push was to get all the official names matched up with the SSN. So one guy, "Matthew Scott Johnson" only went by "Scott Johnson"--to the point that if somebody asked for "Matthew Johnson" we had no idea who they were talking about. Fortunately, he keeps everything legal that needs to be legal.

The other was to make sure that (1) all your jobs that provided earned income subject to payroll taxes was included. And, (2), that only your jobs were included. Because identity theft.