How to Leave Money to Random People Based on Social Security Numbers
Imagine this scenario. You've won the lottery, the big one. The 100 million dollar prize! Or perhaps you've inherited a fortune from a rich relative. Either way, you're now a multi-millionaire and you want to share your sudden wealth with a few random individuals. How to go about this? You could use an approach that is based on the Social Security system, using a publicly-available collection of millions of Social Security numbers. Here's how it could work.
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Instructions
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Use the Social Security Death Index (SSDI) to explore random Social Security numbers. SSDI is the largest, publicly-available source of Social Security numbers. It includes more than 87 million listings of people who have died in the last fifty years.
SSDI allows searching on partial Social Security numbers (SSNs). For instance, you can find all listings for people whose SSN ends in 0001 (there are 8,761 such listings in SSDI). Or you can find all the numbers that begin with 123 (there are 87,873 of these, all issued in New York, since the first three digits of a Social Security number indicate the place of issue). You can use asterisks as wild cards. A search on 06* 1* 123* turned up 311 listings.
There are endless variations of how you can search for an SSN at the Social Security Death Index and generate random lists of individuals. You can even plug in today's date in number format and see what turns up. A direct link to SSDI is included in the References section of this article.
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Identify living family members. Now that you've found a random deceased person, use other resources to identify one or more living relatives as the lucky recipients of your largess. A search through obituaries at sites like Obituaries.com or a people-find service like Intelius will help you identify family members of the random person you have selected from SSDI. Links to these services are included in the References section of this article.
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Make contact. With a name, address and contact information in hand, you can make a random gift of money. You can do this directly by mailing a cashier's check made out to the person you have selected. You can include an explanatory note, if you wish, or just leave it a mystery as far as the recipient is concerned.
You can also approach things indirectly, by letting the intended recipient know they have been randomly selected for a cash gift and asking them to contact you. You should be aware, however, that such a request will have many of the earmarks of a typical scam letter ("Congratulations! You have won the Nigerian lottery!") and that people may be reluctant to respond for this reason.
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References
- Photo Credit fistful of dollars. image by Greg Carpenter from Fotolia.com
