Maybe this is a silly question, but exactly what was the risk? If knowing a random SSN is problematic then it's not exactly hard to just generate a couple yourself.
I used to work for a credit bureau, and a lender once asked us to build an application that could pull credit files based on SSN only. (Pulling a credit file normally requires multiple identifiers.) Fortunately, someone foresaw the very problem that you mentioned, and we declined to build it.