When you read the details, the predominant headlines for this story are highly misleading. The accuracy isn’t all that great for getting all 9 digits correct, and the bot-driven process for overcoming the lack of accuracy suggests to me that there are more efficient ways of collecting and (mis)using SSNs. Not that fraudsters wouldn’t use this or other methods available to them, but I think most folks saw the headline and reacted without getting the full picture.

You know, I’m somewhat surprised at how shocked the rest of the community seems to be. Many of us knew about this and other number schemes and have known about it for a while. Here are a good examples: http://www.highprogrammer.com/alan/numbers/index.html , http://cpsr.org/issues/privacy/SSNStructure/ , http://privacy.cs.cmu.edu/dataprivacy/projects/ssnwatch/