I’m able to look at my credit report and see something suspicious is on my credit report that doesn’t’ belong to me. The fictitious identity doesn’t,” says John Russo, vice-president and legal counsel for Equifax, a consumer credit reporting agency. Privacy restrictions and the lack of information sharing among bureaucracies also hamper investigations. For example, a person could get a driver’s licence with a fake name in B.C and open up an account in Ontario. There are cross provincial challenges as well. “I am aware of individual ways of doing it, ways of changing one’s appearance,” said Det. However there are ways of beating the technology. In the Server Froze case, police discovered the same face was used for nine different licences, meaning nine different identities.īut one possible police tool is Photo Comparison Technology, a software application that compares the characteristics of a person’s face with the results of other photographs. Trying to track down the real people who use their faces on multiple driver’s licences for synthetic identity fraud can pose huge challenges for police. The challenges of fighting synthetic identity fraud Unlike identity theft crimes, in which someone’s personal information such as their name or credit card is used to steal money or purchase goods under that person’s name, synthetic identity fraud creates new identities out of thin air. But a judge disagreed, saying it could have been an oversight owing to a heavy workload. Police suspected an inside job at the Orangeville office and charged two employees. In Orangeville, one driver's licence office issued licences to over 100 synthetic identities, and to some of them more than once. In my experience it’s always somewhere in the middle,' Kelly said, adding he estimated the number to be around 200,000.

“Some will even say as high as a million. “If you talk in hushed corners and ask people honestly what they think, people will give you numbers from the tens of thousands to the hundreds of thousands. They have discovered synthetic identities responsible for $25 million in fraud losses. Toronto Detective Constable Mike Kelly and his partner have been investigating synthetic IDs for about four years.

Fake Id Ontario Drivers License