Moneywise and Yahoo Finance LLC may earn commission or revenue through links in the content below. For millions of Americans, handing a driver's license to a rental-car agent, hotel clerk or security guard is a routine transaction that barely warrants a second thought. But what happens when the system designed to verify your identity becomes a tool that can help criminals steal it?
Jeff Bezos backs a platform that lets anyone invest in rental homes for as little as $100 — 6 ways to build wealth like a landlord without actually being one A record 45% of central banks plan to grow gold reserves — and many investors are following suit. Get your free gold IRA guide from Priority Gold A single line on your car insurance policy could be inflating your premium by up to 30% — here's what to change That question is now hanging over drivers across the country after more than 153 million (1) driver's license records appeared for sale on the dark web. The massive trove reportedly included scans of the front and back of licenses, customer photos and other information that could help a fraudster convincingly pose as someone else.
Even America's defense secretary was apparently caught in the dragnet. Cybersecurity journalist Brian Krebs found a driver's license belonging to Pete Hegseth in the database, prompting the Pentagon to tell TechCrunch (2) it is "aware of these reports and is evaluating them." The license of an FBI assistant director was reportedly exposed as well. The FBI has since confirmed that it is "looking into the incident." Meanwhile, IDScan.net (3) — the identity-verification company identified as the apparent source — has acknowledged (4) that an unauthorized party may have accessed or copied customer information stored in its cloud.
If you have ever had your ID scanned while renting a car, entering a venue or proving your age, you may have no easy way to know where that image was stored — or whether it was swept up in this breach. And unlike a compromised password, you cannot simply change the face, birth date or other identifying details printed on your license. That makes it important to act before an unfamiliar account, loan or transaction appears in your name.
The alarming discovery began when Krebs was tipped off to a new dark-web service called Nexus, which claimed to let paying customers search through a vast collection of stolen identity documents. According to KrebsOnSecurity, Nexus advertised more than 153 million driver's license records from the U.S. and Canada. Krebs' search filtered for Canadian driver's licences returned roughly 1.1 million results, suggesting the overwhelming majority of the 153 million-plus records were American.
Some records reportedly contained multiple images of the same license, including scans captured under infrared and ultraviolet light — features ordinarily used to determine whether an ID is authentic. In other words, the very information gathered to stop someone from using a fake ID may now make it easier to impersonate the person holding a real one. The people behind Nexus claimed they had been pulling data for more than a year.
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