This came from a comment thread…

On the Social Security database investigation by DOGE. Some of the ages being reported can be explained by wives or dependents of deceased being granted their benefits.
I have some experience of that in my own family. My aunt was a dependent of our family for her entire life. Having a brain injury at birth, she had to be cared for, all her life. My father took her in shortly after he and my mother got married, and when they passed she lived with us until she died.

Monthly she received SS benefits, paid out under her fathers SSN. She never had a SSN issued of her own. She never went to high school or worked a regular job.

She was the dependent child of a military veteran who died from service related causes. Her father, a WWI and WWII Navy veteran, was born in the 1880’s.
So from the date of her fathers birth to the date of her own death was 134 years. Same SSN.

I bring this up because as the investigation continues and the many truly fraudulent cases try to take cover behind the few special cases like hers; it’s not hard to tell the difference between them.  Cases like my aunt were rare and come from a time when children were not issued SSN at birth. To create that 134 year old SSN, needed a fifty year old father, his youngest child; who lived to the age of eighty