Hot take: Yet another case of wrongdoing that could have been prevented if the U.S. (or its states) held a canonical registry of people.
If you couldn’t take out an ID card using a birth certificate and proof of residence (electricity bill etc weak measures), maybe this con would never have begun in the first place.
Almost every developed nation in the world has this problem solved.
What would a "canonical registry" include? Like, biometrics of every citizen?
I am from a european country, and when I had to renew my id card I had to prove my identity through answering questions about a part of my family tree my immediate family and I have been no-contact since ever. I had no idea about the names of these people, and the police officer was visibly frustrated. Nothing bad happened in the end but I can imagine if I was acting weird it could have had, because the whole id process was actually a failure.
My experience with other european countries is not much different either in terms of the process, likeprevious residence addresses, people you live with or similar info they have on you, most of which is not very private. Or a witness to testify which actually is the easiest. That's nothing that would have prevented a case like this on its own, without further investigations.
In my country first government issued id is done in the presence of a parent/guardian at the age between 16 and 18. Police before issuing the id will take your fingerprints and you can replace id (if stolen, lost, expired) with a fingerprint only. No questions and no witnesses necessary.
What happens if you lose your fingerprints in some way? Deep burns on your fingers can permanently change your fingerprints. What if you are in an accident and both hands or arms have to be amputated?
Could a bad actor put some sort of coating or prosthetic on their fingers to successfully impersonate someone else?
That's a valid concern, but only for a rather infinitesimal minority of people. Pretty much the definition of a "corner case", so rather irrelevant on the whole.
You can for example sing a contract with someone without notarizing it, but you need two witnesses for contract to be valid/accepted by the legal system.
I guess something like this would resolve the situation. Two persons to confirm your identity.
Well, it’s not mandatory to take out a passport or ID card anywhere that I’m aware. And perhaps a photo ID database would have been as far as I’d be willing to stretch when it comes to storing biometrics.
But you do realize that even the government of each state does not know who lives at what address? The only exception being around the time of each census.
It’s a miracle people can get their mail in the US (and I know a whole neighborhood on Hawaii that can’t!)
> It’s a miracle people can get their mail in the US (and I know a whole neighborhood on Hawaii that can’t!)
Only when you look at it as sending to a person. Really what you do is send it to an address the post office doesn't get a damn what you put above the street address, they just deliver it to the specified location.
Never tried that or had something sent to me that way. Seems like it'd succeed or fail randomly based on the local post office when doing the sortation to individual house bundles.
Yeah, that's how a post office has to operate under those circumstances. It seems to work decently, for the most part.
In my country (Sweden), the post office is able to forward mail to your new address after you move, because they can look up your address in the public registry. (Of course, they charge a fee for this but it's quite small.)
They can and do do that in the US but only for a limited time and you have to tell them your old address and new address. It's essentially a bridge for you to update everyone who might only rarely send you mail. I still get mail for the previous owner more than 4 years after buying my house. (This is confirmed by sending a postcard you either enter a code to complete the redirect or send back in I can't remember exactly I've done it twice in my whole life.)
> But you do realize that even the government of each state does not know who lives at what address?
Do you know that our voter registration, which is organized by state and ultimately administered at the county level, does include that information?
Also, have you considered how a mapping to an address would have helped in this case between two homeless people?
> It’s a miracle people can get their mail in the US (and I know a whole neighborhood on Hawaii that can’t!)
Did a quick web search because this seemed dubious. I think you're referring to a neighborhood that uses PO boxes. They absolutely can and do still "get their mail," they just need to go down the street for it instead of having it dropped 10 feet away from their front door. Less convenient, but not as if the system isn't there, and it would be trivial to have a mail carrier fill in that last half-mile if it made since for that community.
> Do you know that our voter registration, which is organized by state and ultimately administered at the county level, does include that information?
If you're a citizen, and you're correctly registered to vote. Additionally, for various reasons, US voter register quality is relatively poor - one study estimates that there's 6.1 million voters who have their name registered in more than one state (https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/double-registration-and-strat...).
> Do you know that our voter registration, which is organized by state and ultimately administered at the county level, does include that information?
There are lots of people in the US who are not registered to vote. A few reasons:
* They are non-citizens.
* They are children.
* They are convicted felons and live in a state where they are not eligible to vote (either while serving their sentences or after).
* They are eligible, but have chosen not to register.
I'm sure there are other categories of people who are not registered to vote. But even just these represent more than a hundred million people, a good third of the population, at least.
Hey, you know another system that’s broken? The US voting system. Because you can’t know for sure who is entitled to vote if you don’t know who lives in your country.
You’re trying to put the cart before the horse with this argument. A voter registry under the current US system is not going to get higher quality data than the other existing government databases; in other words, it’s equally susceptible to fraud and abuse because it relies on weak authentication measures like phone bills or birth certificates.
Yeah they have to pick up their mail a few miles down the road at a private business which runs their PO boxes. I don’t that’s an acceptable level of service but to each their own, I guess…
The USPS is not a private business. They are the ones who "run" PO boxes. The acronym literally stands for "Post Office box," and they are in post offices.
No, it's not the USPS. I said a private business to keep it a bit anonymous but if you don't believe me, here it is: http://808alohamail.com/
There's hundreds of households on a fairly small area who are not at all served by any mailman, instead they all drive down the road to this place. Three local ladies started it up because the USPS dropped the ball.
I happen to know about this because I know someone local. They also told me about their new place, also on Hawai'i, where the mail instead arrives at a UPS office. (Not USPS. UPS.)
My point is that this new item (and others) make identity theft seem so extremely easy in the U.S. You just have to be determined. Doesn't take any particular skill to forge an electricity bill, doesn't take any skill to give someone else's social security number (which many apparent morons presume are secret), etc.
By moving the posts from "trivial" to "somewhat challenging", I think the U.S. would be better off.
As an example: If I wanted to assume a new identity in Sweden, to get rid of my criminal history, I'd have to make a very convincing fake I.D. card, and make sure to find a "victim" who is not going to sound the alarm when they notice. Basically, as soon as you register their name on your address, a confirmation letter will be sent to that person, which makes it so they can dispute it.
You could probably get away with it if you can find someone who moved abroad and forgot to notify the authorities. Even then, you'd have a really hard time getting a new passport or ID card in their name. It might work if you look a lot like them, and can drag their spouse, parent or sibling to the police station and have them vouch for you (with a valid ID card). I admit it's not impossible! But it certainly is not a thing that you ever hear about on the news.
> Basically, as soon as you register their name on your address, a confirmation letter will be sent to that person, which makes it so they can dispute it.
That doesn't seem relevant to the homeless man in question.
You’re right, that’s one vulnerability in the system.
I don’t know how common it is for someone to want to impersonate a homeless person, though, considering in Sweden you’d probably have to pay up that homeless person’s debt…
Ok, I’m slightly kidding here, but really this kind of long con is not a common mode of identity fraud in Scandinavia, probably because it’s harder to get away with.
The more common identify fraud here would be to assume the identity of someone with a stable economy and then try to take out payday loans in their name. Which a homeless person would be declined for, of course.
It gets rather involved and usually involves phishing the victim into signing something malicious using a digital ID. Not to mention no bank would agree to pay it out in cash. So it requires not only determination but skill as well.
So you just spent three paragraphs hand-waving away the exact situation this article was about.
"I don't know how common it is... not really a common mode of identity fraud... the more common identity fraud here would be..."
It was a homeless victim in this article. It seems like the improvements you're suggesting are entirely off-topic if you admit they wouldn't have helped here.
They would absolutely have helped! If there were, for instance, a proper way to validate what someone looked like, for instance if the national ID database had been consulted for photos of the person when issuing a new ID, then probably they would have realized these two men look nothing alike.
> You could probably get away with it if you can find someone who moved abroad and forgot to notify the authorities. Even then, you'd have a really hard time getting a new passport or ID card in their name.
And if they'd moved to e.g. Finland[1], it wouldn't even have mattered if they'd forgot that -- the Finnish (tax etc) authorities would inform their Swedish counterparts when they register as a resident of their new country.
Source: Got a letter from Swedish Riksskatteverket (tax authority) after I registered at Helsinki Maistraatti (municipal registrar) telling me I'd been moved to "Emigrated" status, back in 1995 when I moved here.
[1]: Probably all the Nordic countries before then, all EU ones now.
If you couldn’t take out an ID card using a birth certificate and proof of residence (electricity bill etc weak measures), maybe this con would never have begun in the first place.
Almost every developed nation in the world has this problem solved.