Two women, one Social Security number: How a bureaucratic error derailed their lives

Two women named Jieun Kim sit in different cities—one in Los Angeles, one in Evanston, Illinois—living parallel lives that have become impossibly entangled. They share not just a name but a birthday, both born on the same day in Seoul, South Korea. In 2018, after immigrating to the United States, they were assigned the same Social Security number. What should have been a simple clerical fix has instead become a five-year nightmare that neither woman has been able to escape.

The first Kim arrived in Los Angeles in 2012 to study English and liberal arts at a community college. She worked as a graphic designer, married a fellow South Korean immigrant, and in recent years applied for a green card—a process that should have taken six months but has stalled indefinitely. The second Kim came to the Chicago suburbs in 2017 to pursue a doctoral degree at Northwestern University on a full scholarship. Both women were issued their Social Security cards in the summer of 2018, just weeks apart. The first received hers on June 18. The second got hers on July 23. Neither knew at that moment that they held identical numbers.

The consequences arrived quietly at first, then with gathering force. The Evanston Kim went to open a bank account at Chase and discovered someone had already done so using her Social Security number. She reported the suspected identity theft to the IRS, the Social Security Administration, and local police, but she was consumed with her studies and let the matter sit. In 2021, she learned that Robinhood had closed her stock trading account without notifying her. The following year, the IRS sent notices saying she had already applied for pandemic relief payments she never requested. By January of last year, her credit cards were canceled. When she called the companies demanding answers, they refused to explain, citing security and identity protection concerns.

Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Kim was experiencing her own cascade of financial disruptions. Banks froze accounts. Credit cards were blocked. She didn't immediately report these incidents, unfamiliar as she was with American bureaucracy, and instead asked her bank to investigate. It wasn't until late January that she became certain something serious was wrong. When she finally contacted the Social Security Administration and police, she received little help.

The breakthrough came by accident. The Evanston Kim, desperate to understand who was using her number, left her contact information with Chase Bank, asking the other person to reach out. The Los Angeles Kim received the message and called. Their first exchange was tense—both women were angry, both felt violated—but within moments they realized the truth. They weren't thieves or victims of theft. They were two people who happened to share one Social Security number.

When they visited their local Social Security offices two days later, the administrators were initially skeptical. Eventually, they admitted the error. But admission was not the same as resolution. The two women's records are now merged. The Social Security Administration lists the Los Angeles Kim as having four parents—her own two and the Evanston Kim's. Their income histories are combined. The agency has refused to issue a letter documenting the mistake, which the Los Angeles Kim needs to move her green card application forward. When she asked Social Security workers about the delay, she says one officer warned her that making a fuss about the mix-up could push her green card processing from six months to two or three years.

The Social Security Administration has not responded to requests for comment about how the error occurred or about the remarks workers allegedly made to the women. An expert on security systems noted that while such errors are rare—the agency has issued 450 million cards with a low error rate—this particular mistake may have been more likely given that Kim is one of the most common Korean surnames. He suggested it sounded like human error or a computer glitch. But the women say the agency has blamed the problem on both Asian name similarity and computer systems, offering contradictory explanations while refusing to take responsibility.

The Los Angeles Kim described the situation as throwing an egg at a huge rock. She lives with the fear of what comes next, uncertain whether her green card will ever be approved, her records still tangled with a stranger's. Both women wait for the Social Security Administration to assign one of them a new number and untangle the financial and immigration consequences of a bureaucratic error that should never have happened in the first place.