Getting hands on fake IDs much easier

[The Straight Story]

Getting hands on fake IDs much easier
BY IAN HAMILTON, Californian staff writer


Last Updated: Thursday, Aug 3 2006 9:54 PM

Making them only takes a computer, scanner and a decent printer. Buying them can cost just $30 or $40.


Michael Toms, resident agent in charge of the Bakersfield office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, holds a forged Permanent Resident Card. Like many forged cards the quality of the card makes the forgery easy to spot if one knows what to look for.
Graphics:

Fake document mills are everywhere, with the number rising in Kern County, and they are making the business of producing and acquiring false identification easier by the day, officials say.

Last week, for example, a Lamont man was sentenced to 15 months in prison for possessing and counterfeiting false identification documents. Authorities say he was creating Social Security and permanent resident cards.

Court filings show it was a simple operation.



http://www.bakersfield.com/102/story/65921.html

"All you need is a computer and you can make a thousand of these things," said Michael Toms, resident agent-in-charge for investigations at the Bakersfield branch of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE.

[havocmom]

1. Papers? Papers? Show me your papers...

Harder and harder for most people to supply the ever-increasing identifications required to jump through the morass of agency red tape. Easier for crooks to get all sorts of IDs and whole identities.

Are we any safer? :banghead:

[AnnInLa]

2. Totally off-topic, but this makes me smile

because in high-school, I was the maker of tons of fake driver's licenses for myself and all my friends, so we could get into the clubs. It was so easy. Several of us used our fake ones to get married with...dumb, dumb, stoopid.