How Musk and Katie Miller perverted a statistic to claim 40% of SSA calls were fraudulent - and insisted on the lie

[muriel_volestrangler]

March 12

Social Security Administration publishes an explanation of phone service changes.

“Approximately 40 percent of Social Security direct deposit fraud is associated with someone calling SSA to change direct deposit bank information.”
...
March 27

A DOGE engineer, Aram Moghaddassi, appears to distort the statistic in a Fox News interview.

“At Social Security, one of the first things we learned is that they get phone calls every day of people trying to change direct deposit information ... We learned 40 percent of the calls that they get are from fraudsters.”
...
April 1

Agency staff draft a statement to correct the false claim and update their analysis. The memo is shared with DOGE leadership.

“Monthly between 25% - 30% of direct deposit allegations are for direct deposit changes initiated over the telephone.”

Katie Miller, a White House aide advising DOGE, doubles down and instructs staff not to release the statement.

“The number is 40 percent.”

April 3

Vice President JD Vance repeats the false claim in another Fox News interview.

“Our Social Security system — 40 percent of the people who are calling in are actually committing fraud.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/16/us/politics/doge-social-security.html

Via Lawyers', Guns & Money, which has a gift link for the NYT article.

"40% of SSA fraud happens via their phoneline" could have been true. Banks might say "60% of customer account fraud happens via email impersonation". Neither statistic tells you anything about how much use of phones, or email, is associated with fraud. Then Aram Moghaddassi, a former X programmer, inverts the statistic. Whether this is because he's a dumb MF who should never be let near an interview or a computer, or he did it to spread a lie, we can't tell. We can see that Musk, who had highlighted the first, believable claim, also promoted this false one as it spread around Twitter. Again, we can't tell if that was because he was out of his skull on ketamine, or because he needed to lie to the USA to carry out his evil intentions,.

But by the time the agency staff are trying to correct it, we can clearly see the malicious intentions of Katie Miller, who is knowingly suppressing the facts put forward by the experts in the agency in favour of "we've said this, so we order everyone to back up our lie".

And J Divan Vance gleefully spread the lie.

[Irish_Dem]

1. A lie for the sole purpose of destroying Social Security and Medicare for senior citizens.

Which will inflict pain, suffering, death.