Yes, it's technically possible to create a different coin with the same name. It will be two separate blockchains and it will work just fine. People or may not have a difficult time discerning the two but that's a different story.

Most of the time small acronyms are duplicate by mistake, it's rare that someone duplicates some cryptocurrency with malicious intent and I don't think that would work anyways.
Exchanges are free to set their own acronyms in the trading pairs should they want to add two coins that have the same official acronym.