Assuming that the age field is the only thing being used for determining payouts is really wildly naive. If you wanted to game SSA, this would be the dumbest and easiest-to-catch way to do it. Your other garbage about how frontline worker estimates of fraud being large means the fraud itself must be large bespeak a silly person who’s already reached the conclusion he wants. All your conspiracy theorizing sounds like a person marinating in right wing garbage news sites for a while. Sorry to your family.
Dumb and easy to catch, yes you're right, and yet it happens all the time. An example from the UK [1]:
(Feb 2025) Bereaved families asked to return pension overpayments
Over the past five years, the DWP mistakenly paid more than £500m in state pensions and pension credits to the deceased, recovering about half from bereaved relatives.
They can't prosecute this because it's not fraud if someone just gives you money and then later realizes it was a mistake. So they must resort to asking the families if they'd kindly return the money.
You say the age field isn't the only thing being used to determine payouts - obviously that's true, there is also the is_dead field. These systems are about giving you money after a certain age until you die. If those fields are inaccurate then the money paid out will also be inaccurate.
It's unfortunate you got so personal at the end there. There's no conspiracy being theorized anywhere here. Just a lack of care when it comes to other people's money.
