Could you go ask your neighbor for their social security number please?

My first year out of high school I took a position at a call center in my city. The company is a third party retailer that does inbound sales for a number of different companies. I was assigned to sell Dish Network TV packages. As with any call center, we were encouraged to upsell upsell upsell. Management didn’t care what the circumstances were. We had a script and were required to hit at least 80% of the “points” listed. How well we followed the script directly impacted how much commission we made. We were required to get the customers social security number to run a credit check before we could give them ANY information on pricing. Typically customers would just laugh and hang up when I, some idiot 18 year old, would ask them for their social over the phone before telling them about how much it would cost to buy an ESPN package. This never really bothered me because I mean, yeah. I wouldn’t either. When people did give you their social for the credit check, their credit was usually terrible and as a result the price would be absolutely ridiculous and they just flat out wouldn’t be able to afford it. One of our quality points from our script was literally to tell them to GO ASK THEIR NEIGHBOR FOR THEIR SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER TO SEE IF THEY HAD BETTER CREDIT THEY COULD QUALIFY UNDER. I was constantly butting heads with management because I flat out refused to ask someone to do that. The idea made me so uncomfortable. When someone told me “yeah sorry I don’t have the money to pay for this” I didn’t ever push further. It’s just satellite TV, if you can’t afford it you probably shouldn’t get it. One day I was called into my supervisors office because I was failing to meet “quality point” requirements again. My supervisor essentially told me if I didn’t ask my next customer with bad credit to go ask their neighbor for their social, I was fired. About 2 calls after the meeting I had a customer who’s credit was non-existent and as a result they had almost $600 in fees upfront they would need to pay for our bare minimum package. I gritted my teeth and hesitantly said, “um…could you..go see if your neighbor would give you their social?? And we could see if they have better credit?”. To my surprise the customer replied “yeah sure give me a minute”. He returned about 5 minutes later with his neighbors social security number. I ran the check and they had near perfect credit and I ended up selling him our premium package. To this day I’m half convinced my supervisor staged the call. I can’t wrap my mind around the idea of someone actually doing that, but I made decent money off of that call so, oh well I suppose? I ended up quitting that job and enrolling in school about a month later because of how slimy it made me feel. As I type this I’m just now realizing the likelihood that this guy committed identity fraud. Hm.