Maybe because I'm not American I'm missing some fine point, but is your SSN not on dozens of documents that go out by mail all the time? For example, I recently set up online billing for our place in Florida. The SSN was a required field. I couldn't fill that out and had to find a workaround with the call centre. My does the electricity company need a SSN? I'll bet that if I stole one letter at random from every mailbox on a particular street, I'd have a number of SSNs at my disposal.