I just wrote a reply to marstegreg about the electronic forgery thing. I’ll ask my husband; he deals a lot with security and knows a lot about 4Chan and the other jacka**es who do this kind of “prank”. I agree with you; I’d be really curious to see stats on celebrity forgeries — that sounds like the kind of thing geeky 14-year-olds would love.
A slightly-related story: one of my 9-year-old students wrote a nasty series of fake emails to his arch enemy from a *hacked* account linked to our school principal. They started out fairly believable, talking about summer homework. But his inner child had to come out, so he started insulting the other kid by the third email. And he also screwed up because he forgot the principal would be able to spell at a better than third-grade level. ;) Boy, that was an uncomfortable conversation with the criminal’s dad, a computer programmer.
Strikes me as though it would be useful temp cache accounts, filtering the electronic transactions from a source account through a series of intermediaries until it reached one ultimate payout account, with intermediate draws available at any time.
http://www.jonchristianryter.com/2010/100419.html
Interesting read on a number of both Barack and Michelle Obama’s use of multiple SSNs also assigned to other people.
Interestingly, NONE of the SSNs were EVER issued out of Hawaii, indicating he never was a citizen of Hawaii.