Identity Theft in Criminal Records

Take a close look at this guy. Do you know him? Well, that's okay, neither do the law enforcement agencies that arrested him, courts that convicted him, or jails that incarcerated him.

He was first arrested and convicted in 1996 in Berkeley County, South Carolina for domestic violence and DWI. That is where the mugshot at left was taken.

Then, in 2001 and 2002, he had convictions in Navarro County, Texas for criminal trespass, theft, and DWI. From the mugshots at left, it looks like the intervening years were rough ones (the little lines in the background are never a good sign, by the way)!

He was tried and convicted for his offenses. The problem is that he isn't who he claimed - he used another person's identity to pay his crimes!

Imperative uncovered this issue while conducting a background investigation on the individual whose identity he stole. That individual's identity research indicated that he had always resided in Tarrant County, Texas.

So when the multi-jurisdictional criminal records database suggested that our subject (who had a ridiculously unique name) had fairly recent criminal records in South Carolina and Southeast Texas, we were surprised. Because we never trust the information from criminal records databases, we verified the records directly with the courts before reporting the information to our client. The problem was that the cases were associated with our applicant's name and date of birth. The defendant's addresses in the court computer records couldn't be associated with the subject of our report, however we couldn't associate them with anyone else with our subject's last name either. So, we reported the case to our client.

Within minutes, our client called us. The applicant, he said, had been referred by an employee who had worked with him previously at another social service agency. Additionally, the client had already verified his employment, all of which was local and overlapped the times the court records indicated he was incarcerated. Something was definitely amiss.

Then, our client gave us a crucial bit of information. His applicant was a black male.

We contacted the law enforcement agencies that had held the offender in custody. They informed us that their records related to a white male. We informed our client that something was not right and we were reopening our investigation. We immediately ordered the offender's mugshots from the law enforcement agencies and copies of the case files from the courts - we received both within 24 hours.

The mugshots definitely weren't those of a six foot tall black male - the offender was a five foot, six inch tall white guy! When the court copies arrived, we found another issue: the Texas drivers license and social security numbers in the Texas court's file belonged to a female.

Now convinced that the criminal records we reported did not belong to our client's applicant, we immediately delivered a revised background investigation to our client. At the same time, we provided all of the information about the criminal records bearing his name to the applicant so that he could begin the arduous process getting the courts to clean up their records.

The remaining question is... who did those agencies have in custody?