Saturday, May 20, 2000
Need phony ID? It's just a download away
By Marcy Gordon
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON — On sale online: fake passports, Social Security cards, birth certificates, driver's licenses, college diplomas, press credentials and even IDs for police officers and FBI agents.
They're fraudulent but authentic-looking enough to enable users to steal people's identities, get loans or convince enemies that they're being arrested.
You can buy them online, or you can make them yourself. A 23-year-old convicted felon told a Senate panel Friday how he created phony documents using a computer at a public library and public government records online. He used the bogus documents to get $59,000 in car loans.
The new and growing Internet phenomenon accounts for about 30 percent of all fake ID documents in this country, according to some law
enforcement officials. “The availability of false identification on the Internet is a ... growing problem, to which we plan to devote additional resources and attention,” Secret Service Director Brian Stafford testified before the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee's investigative subcommittee.
There are three levels of fake ID procurement, the Senate subcommittee investigators found in a five-month undercover inquiry:
• Some Web sites sell bogus, real-looking documents in the customer's name.
• Others sell high-quality computer files, called templates, that allow customers to make their own phony documents. One such site, operated by a 21-year-old college student, charged customers $14.95 a month for templates. He rang up some $8,000 in sales from mid-October to mid-December last year, the Senate investigators found.
• In the third category are do-it-yourself counterfeiters like Thomas W. Seitz, who used the phony documents to get car loans. “I realize what I did was illegal, but I also must say that it was not very difficult to accomplish,” he testified.
Mr. Seitz, originally from New Brunswick, N.J., is serving a three-year state prison term for theft by deception and forgery. He also has pleaded guilty to a federal charge of bank fraud and is awaiting sentencing in Florida.
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