Phoning into a Wisconsin town hall, Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) head Elon Musk told listeners that DOGE had caught a scammer who had stolen hundreds of thousands of Social Security numbers and other personal details from the Social Security database, and that the thief faced imminent arrest for his lawbreaking.
As background, Musk’s comments to listeners at the Monday, March 31, town hall came in the wake of DOGE’s comments about how Social Security has been pilfered by a wide variety of forms of fraud, including millions of illegal immigrants allegedly being given Social Security numbers and access to the program’s benefits.
But what Elon revealed to the town hall on Monday night wasn’t government-abetted fraud of that sort so much as an abominable individual scamming hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of Americans out of their personal information, such as their Social Security numbers.
Announcing as much, Elon said that the scammer would soon be arrested for the sweeping crime. He said, “I believe someone is going to be arrested tomorrow, because there’s someone who actually stole 400,000 Social Security numbers and personal information from the Social Security database.”
Continuing, the billionaire entrepreneur and DOGE head explained what the scammer was doing with the stolen Social Security information, saying that he was enabling the pilfering of the pension program. As Elon put it, the scammer was “selling Social Security numbers and all the identification information in order for people to basically steal money from Social Security.”
Musk then commented on the relation of illegal immigration to Social Security fraud, saying that illegal immigrants steal numbers so that they have identification. He said, “A particular avenue of fraud for like illegal immigrants and for voter fraud, because the main way that identification is established in the United States is via Social Security.”
WOW. Elon says people will start getting arrested for social security fraud. One person stole 400k social security numbers!
Arrest all the fraudsters! pic.twitter.com/omq1hg2ZEn
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) April 1, 2025
Elon then added that, in stealing the numbers, they get registered to vote, which means they could be illegally voting in American elections. He informed the crowd, “So, if you compromise a Social Security system, you can basically get people to get de facto registered to vote, even if they’re not citizens, and to get a bunch of benefits.”
Speaking about the matter previously, Elon said, “This is worth … reiterating…People sometimes think that under the Biden administration, he was simply asleep at the switch. He wasn’t asleep… It was a massive, large-scale program to import as many illegals as possible, ultimately, to change the entire voting map of the United States and disenfranchise the American people and make it a permanent, deeply, one-party state from which there would be no escape.”
Building on that, one of DOGE’s team members added, “The defaults in the system, from Social Security to all of the benefit programs, have been set to max inclusion, Max pay for these people, and minimum collection. That’s what’s happening. We found 1.3 million of them already on Medicaid as an example.”