[glennaro]

Before I came to the obvious conclusions that SSNs are no longer private, I just used a fake one with the following alphabet numbers:
621-31-1920 (6-21-3-11-9-20)

Nobody ever questioned it because they never used it ... they just wanted it.

[George from New England]

The reality is its is only used for collection actions. Offices will claim “the law requires it” to be submitted. Or “insurance requires it” or “we need it to verify you are who you say you are”. All crap.

[RideForever]

621-31-1920 (6-21-3-11-9-20)
Nobody ever questioned it because they never used it ... they just wanted it.
_____________________________________

From retired computer programmer pov, the first thing I would do is strip all special characters from the string, check the count of digits remaining, and post error if not 10. So you really don’t know whether they used it or not.