FBI Probes Service Selling 153M+ Drivers Licenses (opens in a new tab)
Why readScans of 153 million North American drivers licenses, including those of serving senior US officials, are on sale, and the apparent source is an identity verification vendor many organisations rely on.
A new listing on the Exploit forum advertises digital identity document images covering more than 170 million people, with over 153 million US and Canadian license scans available for purchase. Interviews with people whose documents appear in the service point to a Louisiana identity verification provider as the collection point, and the FBI's New Orleans field office has opened an inquiry. The practical consequence is that document image checks, the control many services adopted to defeat synthetic identity fraud, now have a large pool of genuine scans available to attackers, so any onboarding flow that trusts a license image as proof of identity needs rethinking.