It wasn’t that hard. Spend a couple hours in the children’s section of a cemetery in some midsize Midwest city, and you’d have a list of names of babies, who most likely died right in that very county. Request a copy of a birth certificate from the local county offices. Use that to apply for a Social Security Card, and use that and the birth certificate to get a driver’s license.
Most of it has to be done through the mail, so it will take a while, but that’s the worst of it.
Can’t do that today, though. They’ve locked down birth certificates pretty well, it would be hard to get your mitts on one. These days they tend to just steal someone else’s identity, and live parallel lives with someone else.
homes@piefed.world 12 hours ago
You just described to me how it’s extremely difficult and requires a lot of effort.
BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today 11 hours ago
Yeah, that was life before the Internet. You actually had to do stuff. You couldn’t just click a few keys, and get what you want.
Still, to create an entirely new identity, and disappear? Today, you couldn’t do it all. A little legwork and a few months of waiting for mail isn’t that much to ask.
homes@piefed.world 10 hours ago
Literally, nobody said that. And you’re also making my point that it would be a huge pain in the ass, not “easy“.
I wouldn’t know, and that’s not what we’re discussing here. But, once again, you’ve made my point for me that it wouldn’t be “easy“, it would be a gigantic pain in the ass.
BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today 9 hours ago
It was something you could do yourself, and not have to track down some sketchy criminal to buy some fake identity that may or may not work.
It was a major crime that you could pull off all by yourself, without getting involved with anyone else. It wasn’t a pain in the ass, any more than anything was a pain in the ass in the olden days. Want to buy something? Get your ass in the car and go to the store. Want a gift for someone in another state? You had to buy it, box it, and take it to the post office to mail it. No buying it from Amazon and having it delivered, without ever leaving your chair.
Spending a couple of hours in a cemetery, them mailing a couple of letters, would have been considered a pretty easy major crime in those days.