Financial Cryptography

Buying ID documents

Another structural beam just rusted and fell out of the foundations of the Identity Society. There is now a (thriving?) offshore market in forged secondary documents. Things like electricity bills, phone bills, credit documents, council or city papers can be drawn up for cash.

Beverley Young of Cifas, a fraud advice service set up by the credit industry, said: 'It is hard to prevent criminals using the internet to find false documentation, which can then be used to steal people's identities.

'We can warn people about false documents, but the sophisticated techniques used by the fraudsters mean that in most cases we cannot stop them. The regulators are powerless, too. ...

Cifas said the replica documents looked authentic because the people operating many of the websites had bought up printing equipment that was used by the companies whose documents they fake.

Fraud investigating company CPP of York accessed one of these websites and paid £200 for false statements from British Gas, Barclaycard, Barclays bank and Revenue & Customs.

As a reminder - what's left to establish Rights? There are a wealth of other techniques in Rights:

• web of trust like OpenPGP, CACert,
• nymous techniques leading up to capabilities (hard assets not credit)
• tokens popularised by the blinded cash formula
• Brands framework

From a technology pov we have no issue. But for society at large this is yet more evidence of a looming clash between the unstoppable machine of Identity and the unimpressible rock of reality.