The applicant is actually three people involved in a scam. One is an US person that can provide valid US SSN or other magic numbers, but otherwise doesn't know first thing about anything. Second is the person running the scam, located anywhere. Third is a person from low-cost country that's skilled enough to pass the interview pretending to be the first person, who might also be responsible for doing the actual job such the interviews succeed. The fat US salary is split between the three parties.
This is actually the case of a thing you mentioned, just sadly in reverse. A phone number may indeed not identify a single person. It may represent three unrelated individuals at the same time.
FWIW, I'm 100% with you on your list. Even if it's only 1% of false positives, it's a massive number of people at global scale, and frankly also a big percentage. Outside of tech, hardly anyone is allowed this kind of error rate.
