CiviCRM Dedupe - How does it really work?
Whether it is technically called deduping or not, these kind of things do occur in real life :-).
You should be able to set up dedupe rules that catches them, and one organization I worked with used different 'levels' of deduping rules in their process. For example:


dedupe on something like social security number where it is pretty obvious that they are quite possibly real dedupes, and fix those
dedupe on email_address where there is a reasonable chance that they are dedupes, and fix those


dedupe on something like part of first_name and part of last_name, where chances are that in quite a few cases there are no real dedupes, and fix those if fixes are required.



Obviously the system can not tell you if I have a girl called Louise Tomlinson and another girl called Louise Tomlynson that they are the same or actually someone else. It can only flag that they look the same.