National identity card schemes usually end badly for somebody, usually the average citizen. These overpriced schemes usually assist death-by-government programmes or become one point of failure that usually fails through corruption and/or criminal action.
The National Identity Card scheme will be abolished within 100 days with all cards becoming invalid, Home Secretary Theresa May has said.
Question #10 is, “What evidence do you have that this is all true?”
Identity documents and what the person in question tells you are not sound evidence of a person’s identity. A person’s identity is rooted in their life — where they have lived, worked, gone to school, their relatives and friends.
Countries that have a national identity card system run the risk of the identity card becoming the single point of failure by making the card the only source of identity information. When this happens, the crook can hide behind the card produced by a compromised system.
If you are in a position that requires you to test claims of identity, then you have to dig deeper for supporting documentation and verification.
The best place to start digging is the persons employment. This may be faked by providing fake companies with phone numbers that are answered by confederates. Check for the existence of the firms before contacting them. A good place to start is to Google the firm’s phone number to see if appears associated with the firm and nothing else.
For current residence ask for utility bills and home insurance policies. A faker may have a utility bill but they rarely pay for a fake home insurance policy.
When checking references, always ask for the names and contact details of the subject’s friends and family. Of course, you rarely get this, but you may get useful corroborating data, or you may learn that these people don’t really know the subject if they do not know any of his friends or family.
Questions #8 and #9 are, “What is your passport number?” and “Where was it issued?”
Most people regard a passport as the most reliable and secure identity document. However, this is far from the truth of the matter. For example, Citizenship and Immigration Canada does not accept certain travel documents because they are easily forged or obtained through fraud.
On March 11, 2010, CIC amended the Immigration and Refugee Protection Regulations to clarify the factors used to determine which travel documents can be used to apply for a visa, and to travel to or enter Canada.
Under the new Regulations, the following travel documents are considered unreliable and are not acceptable for entry into Canada:
- any passport claiming to have been issued by Somalia,
- non-machine readable passports issued by the Czech Republic,
- temporary passports issued by the Republic of South Africa, and
- provisional passports issued by Venezuela.
We have not found any way to link a passport number to the issuing country and the person named in it. Nor, have we found a reliable source of information about how to recognise a forged passport. This makes relying on such a document without expert knowledge and the resources of a government department unwise.
If the current passport was issued through an embassy outside the country of residence, then you may have reason to investigate further. Also, remember, it is easier to make yourself look like the person pictured in the passport than it is to forge the passport. If you have any doubt that the person in the passport is the person before you, then action must be taken.
Question #7 is, “What are your phone numbers?”
I always ask for home, work, fax, and mobile numbers. I always Google these numbers and search them in D&B and other databases with a telephone number field. It is amazing what turns-up when you do this. For example, dozens of businesses using the same fax number, or prostitution ads using the same number. Things like this have to be investigated.
I recently found a subject’s mobile phone number on eBay where he was selling goods from his former employer who found this very odd, but the police didn’t — they charged him with a series of thefts.
Email addresses should be treated in the same manner but also search for usernames and social sites associated with the subject.
Question #1 is, What is your name?
This isn’t a simple question. For example, Russian surnames have masculine and feminine versions. The UK government provides A Guide to Names and Naming Practices to help guide its personnel through the process of understanding names from other cultures. This guide is the best of its kind that I have seen.
Question #6 is, Where do you live?
This isn’t as straightforward as it seems. People often have mailing addresses, contact addresses for service of process, employment addresses, and an address for government contact. You have to sort through all this and determine what each address is used for and then determine where the person actually resides. As a matter of course, you verify that the provided address is a residential address and that he or she does in fact live there. (The best verification is that you find him at home in the evening in the middle of the week.)
Question #5 is, “What is your Social Security Number or Social Insurance Number?”
The SSN in the USA and the Social Insurance Number (SIN) in Canada are national identifiers.
In Canada, it is rare to find somebody with two Social Insurance Numbers (SIN). Where this happens it may be a case of clerical error or a reference to a former SIN appropriated by an identity thief. Both reasons are extremely rare. In thirty years I have only encountered this once. The Canadian SIN is used as an identifier less than the SSN is in the USA. In Canada it is primarily used as an identifier between the person and government.
In the USA, the case is somewhat different. When searching through database aggregators such as IRB, it is common to find a subject referenced with two or three Social Security Numbers (SSN). Here are some of the reasons a person may show-up with multiple SSN’s:
You need to understand these national identifiers and be able to determine if they are valid or not, and determine if the person using the number is the person to whom it was issued.
This is Question #4.
This may tell you that the subject immigrated to your country and may not be a citizen. A citizen of another country may have loyalties that pose a security risk or the country of origin may have a culture with a history of producing criminals. This person may not have a legal right to reside in your country. It is important to understand these things for a variety of reasons. For example, an employer may be at risk of prosecution for employing an illegal immigrant. In a fraud, the proceeds of the crime may be sent to another country.
If the person now has a different name than at birth, then you have to ask more questions about why the change occurred. If the person chose to change his or her name, then you need to learn why this occurred, when it occurred, and most importantly, where it was done if you need to confirm the legal name change. You may also have to search for legal name changes in a variety of jurisdictions. It is not uncommon for a person to change his name legally in one jurisdiction while living in another.
In many common-law countries you may, theoretically, change your name without legal intervention if you do so for no improper purpose and the name is yours permanently after seven years. However, the bureaucracies in charge of identifying documents don’t exactly make this easy for obvious reasons.
This is question #2.
The name is only part of a person’s identifying information. The date of birth represents a universal identifier everywhere in the world, but it is often wrong or misleading. Did you know that some cultures often use the date of conception as a birth date? In America before the sixties “sexual revolution” dates of birth were often changed to conceal a premarital pregnancy.
Some people start using a latter date of birth to join the military and keep that date of birth throughout their lives. Some use an earlier or latter date of birth to appear more attractive in the job market. Others get younger every few years.
A person’s identity is composed of many components. It originates with one’s parents at birth and develops unto death and beyond.
This is question #1 and more difficult to answer than you might think.
You will encounter problems with aliases, middle names, nick names, and generational designators. You will have to deal with maiden names, and name changes, legal or otherwise. You must also actively look for alternate names while conducting your research.
Different spelling variations of the name may all be pronounced the same. You may have to do some research to find the variations using the Penguin Dictionary of Names and other sources that specialize in names originating in different countries.
Evaluate likely search results by looking at how common the name is. In the USA the census data is used to generate a list of surnames in order of popularity. No such list could be found for Canada.
Names in in Arabic, Urdu, and many other languages should be written in the native script by the subject. You may find that his name translates into something different than what he is telling you it is in English.
Ten questions to ask about a person’s identity:
In following articles I will look at each of these questions in more detail.
The first stage of any investigation is to determine the identity of the person you are investigating. Martin Collacott, a former Canadian diplomat and ambassador, recently pointed out, the existence of widespread fraud perpetuated against Canada’s immigration and refugee system makes it hard to know who you are dealing with if the person manages to get into Canada.
… Canadians should be aware, however, of the very high levels of misrepresentation, including identity fraud, that this and other Canadian visa offices have to contend with on a daily basis.
This problem is by no means confined to posts in Africa, nor is it a recent phenomenon. In the 1950s, for example, it was discovered that a large proportion of immigrants who had recently arrived from Hong Kong had done so fraudulently …
In 2002, the immigration office in Hong Kong reported that half of the 33,000 immigration cases awaiting processing involved misleading or fraudulent information.
In the case of applications from China, our largest source of immigration, access to information requests in recent years have revealed, for example, that 57 per cent of student visa applications from Fujian Province in China were submitted with fraudulent documents while a sampling of business immigration applications from that country found that only 35 per cent were bona fide.
In the case of our second largest source country, India, although the rejection rate for applications at our largest visa office, Delhi, is only 19 per cent, in Chandigarh in the Punjab, most had to be turned down — a large percentage because of the high incidence of fraudulent documents or other forms of misrepresentation …
At our office in Nairobi, which is the main overseas centre for the processing of applications by people from Somalia seeking settlement as refugees abroad, fraud, and particularly identity fraud, is a major problem …
A Wisconsin woman has been convicted of disorderly conduct for posting her ex-boyfriend’s work telephone number and photos under the “casual encounters” section of Craigslist, encouraging men to “talk dirty to me.”
The 20-year-old has been ordered to write an apology and perform community service for the misdemeanor charge, and should consider herself lucky. She was originally charged with identity theft, a felony that would have entailed time in an unflattering orange jumpsuit.
In Canada, it is rare to find somebody with two Social Insurance Numbers (SIN). Where this happens it may be a case of clerical error or a reference to a former SIN appropriated by an identity thief. The former reason is extremely rare. In thirty years I have only encountered this once. The Canadian SIN is used as an identifier less than the SSN is in the USA.
However, in the USA the case is somewhat different. According to Susan Daniels, of Daniels and Associates Investigations, Inc. in Chardon Ohio, when searching through database aggregators such as IRB, it is common to find a subject referenced with two or three Social Security Numbers (SSN). Here are some of the reasons a person may show-up with multiple SSN’s:
Susan Daniels of Daniels and Associates Investigations, Inc. (9754 Thwing Road Chardon, OH 44024, Tel.:440.286.4072) has been a Private Investigator for 15 years.