Easy prey for ID thieves: Foreign scholars

L.A. ring targets those who moved on after U.S. stints, expert says

- BY CLARA HARTER

Using apartments in the San Fernando Valley and Glendale area, a shadowy group of identity thieves has been quietly exploiting a new kind of victim —foreign scholars who left the U.S. years ago but whose Social Security numbers still linger in American databases, according to a cybercrime expert.

Criminals are resurrecting these dormant identities and submitting hundreds of applications for bank accounts and credit cards, says David Maimon, head of fraud insights at SentiLink and a criminology professor at Georgia State University. The Southern California-based fraudsters can then max out lines of credit while unknowing victims live halfway across the world, he says.

Sgt. Frank Diana, with the L.A. County Sheriff's Department Fraud and Cyber Crimes Bureau, said organized crime rings in the county are highly skilled at stealing identities, concealing their IP addresses and laundering their loot to make it hard to detect.

Local identity crime rings "are doing it to make millions of dollars, live in nice houses, all at the expense of taxpayers," Diana said. "It's not their money, but they're living like kings."

Maimon and his colleague Karl Lubenow said they uncovered this tactic of stealing foreign scholars' IDs through their work at SentiLink, a company that works with financial institutions to verify identities and detect fraud.

At first they were asked to examine applications on which foreign movie stars and athletes were probably being impersonated.

In the process, they said, investigation their unearthed something much larger: hundreds of applications submitted to major credit issuers from a set of similar California street addresses and IP addresses in September.

As they sifted through the files, they saw that, in addition to targeting a handful of foreign celebrities, the fraudsters were impersonating scores of former foreign scholars who had come to the U.S. as long ago as 1977 and left as recently as 2024.