Intelligence agenceis routinely do the same thing. It's an unfortunate practice, with potential to blow up in ones face, but it's also sometimes necessary to build a credible deap cover back story. It's very difficult to insert and properly age documents in hardcopy archives 25-30 years old. As more things become digitized from the ground up, the necessity of using real people goes down dramatically as the governments can just "make" fake people to be their agent identieis.