It does happen, and it happens in the average person’s daily life more often than they realize either because the person does a good enough job revealing themselves, or the average person is too casually oblivious for anyone to become suspicious. A great example is witness protection program, and funnily enough I also have a personal (and true) "story" for this.

I’ll start off by saying, I absolutely do not knowingly know anybody in witness protection. However, I was watching a miniseries on the program years ago, and they went over this one person who just wouldn’t adhere to the rules of the program, to the point where this person was eventually dropped from the program early because they kept having to move this person. The documentary went on to mention several of the locations this person had been bounced around, and one of them was my hometown. To be clear, I don’t mean my general metro area; I mean my specific small town of 15,000 people was named.

So what this most likely means is that one of my elder relatives - a parent, an aunt or uncle, a grandparent - or a close friend or neighbor has likely unknowingly developed a relationship of some sort with someone who was in the witness protection program. Of course this is completely unconfirmed, and comes down to sheer probability evaluation. But in a town of 15,000, it is certainly reasonable to say that one, if not multiple, people that I know, themselves know someone in witness protection. I’d give the chance that I personally know this person at far less than 1%. But they exist, the documentary confirmed they exist, and they existed in my small town.

The point I’m trying to make with this story is that this isn’t special or unique. It happens everywhere, all the time, relatively speaking. The reason you hardly hear of it is because the programs work.