The vulnerability that enabled this form of fraud was structural: before the computerization of government records and before systematic cross-referencing of birth certificates against death records and Social Security issuances, the administrative systems that established and maintained individual identities operated in silos. A birth certificate was issued in one jurisdiction. A death certificate was issued in a different jurisdiction. A Social Security number application was processed in yet another administrative context. There was no routine mechanism for these systems to communicate.
An individual who wanted to assume a false identity and who had access to information about a deceased person — birth date, birthplace, parents’ names — could present a copy of the birth certificate to a Social Security office in a location distant from where the death had occurred, and the application would typically be processed without the office having any means to verify whether the person named was living or dead.
The Social Security Administration improved its death matching systems considerably in the decades following the period when Nichols obtained the Chandler card. The Death Master File, a database of reported deaths maintained by the SSA, became increasingly comprehensive and was eventually cross-referenced against new Social Security issuances. By the 1990s and 2000s, the kind of application that had succeeded for Nichols in 1978 would have been far more likely to be flagged and investigated.
The Chandler case sits at a historical moment when these vulnerabilities were still exploitable but were beginning to close. Nichols used a technique that had been available for decades, applied it successfully in 1978, and then lived out his years under the identity he had acquired before the systems that would have caught such a fraud were in place.