While posting pictures of payphones on Smith Street in Brooklyn I entered one of the payphone numbers into a search engine and discovered the Fake U.S. Identities Site.
718-246-5413 is the number of a payphone on Smith Street, near Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. But according to the Fake U.S. Identities site that number belongs to one Frizzell Alan Schrader residing at 77 Montague Street in Brooklyn.
No such person exists, and it appears that 77 Montague Street is a fictional address. Mr. Schrader’s phone number, I accidentally discovered, traces to a Carroll Gardens payphone on Smith Street near Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn.
Typing in my full name at the fake identities site turned up my fake self, one Mark Alexander Thomas residing at 1106 Open Field Drive, an address which does not appear to exist in the town of Garner, North Carolina.
The bogus data on me all looks reasonably believable at a glance, save for the birth date of May 32, 1975. In the future maybe dates such as May 32nd will be a fashionable way to refer to June 1, and January 365 will be a hip way of referring to what we now call December 31. Until that time my fake identity does not quite parse.
I connected with the spirit of this web site because my identity was stolen over 10 years ago. It does not torment me like it used to but a decade’s passage has not fully allowed the anxiety caused by that incident to fade. Not only could it happen again but the fallout could be much worse given the increasingly sophisticated (and targeted) nature of identity theft today.
I got off relatively easy back then. Perpetrators (never identified) walked into Sam’s Club (and other establishments with lax credit screening protocols) armed with nothing more than my name and social security number. Credit applications using my name and SS# combined with fake addresses and phone numbers were promptly approved and purchases for hundreds of dollars were made.
My credit rating was toast. It took months to weed out bogus entries on my credit report — some of which reappeared years later.
A visit from two very helpful and understanding officers from New York Police Department did nothing to catch the crooks, though it was without question one of the most memorable encounters of my life. To this day I spontaneously play back parts of that conversation in my mind.
It took me a minute to comprehend the meaning of the fake identities sites (there are three others), which appear to be products of considerable investments in time and data crunching skills.
At first these sites would seem to be decoys, designed to confuse or mislead those who trawl web sites mining for information that could be used to steal identities. There are countless web sites with the business model of making thousands, even millions of names, addresses, and phone numbers publicly available. This information is drawn from public sources or simply from scraping web sites and databases. It is believed that many instances of identity theft begin with information gathered from these sources.
Identity thieves are not exactly who the fake identity sites target. More precisely they are designed to engage in search engine jujitsu with those sites that catalog peoples’ genuine personal information for commercial gain. The fake identities site lists 29 of these “web sties” which harvest personal information from public and commercial data sources. Some of these services claim they will remove your data upon request — for a fee, of course.
The creators of the fake identities site refer to these services as “web sties”. A “sty” is defined by dictionaries as “a filthy room or dwelling” and a “place of bestial debauchery“. The spelling error may not be intentional but if it is intended then it offers just a glimmer of the creators disdain for businesses built on publicly cataloging millions of individuals’ personal information.
Perhaps to the credit (or prescience) of the fake identity sites it appears that a majority of the 29 “sties” referenced either no longer exist or have changed their focus. phonenumberauthority, phonery, valueappeal, lookup-pad, mmnumber, and others listed at the Fake U.S. Identities site are either gone, have changed direction, or have retreated to the backwash status of parked domains, perhaps to reëmerge some day.
I enjoy anarchy in the data realm, but this fake info site is not without legitimate hazards. Some of us actually want to be found at our real, legitimate web presence without our reputation or perceived honesty being jeopardized. Someone with an Internet-fueled 3-second attention span could look up my name, glance at the search results without actually clicking through to any of them, and assume that I have lied all these years about living in New York and that I actually live in North Carolina.
To address that concern there is an option to “occlude” records, which appears to be as simple as typing in a captcha. (That should probably be “exclude”. “Occlude” either means to block a passageway or to absorb. I guess deletion of a record could be thought of as absorption into oblivion, but that that does not sound like typical usage.)
In the interest of foiling identity thieves or serving as a more convincing decoy the fake identities project could be more effective if its purpose was not so loudly announced atop every page. Somewhere in the fine print, perhaps, an explanation of why this site exists could be planted. Or maybe access to the site could only be allowed after clicking a lengthy “Terms of Service” (which no one would ever read) in which the bogosity of the data is explained.
The data would also be more effective if disseminated across multiple web sites designed to look like the “web sties” that so irk these sites’ creators. At present there appear to be 3 sites with fake U.S. identities and one with non-existent British names and addresses. If hundreds or even thousands of these sites existed then the goal of bumping loathed “sties” off the first page of search engine results could more readily be achieved. Then people’s real identities and personal information could be a little bit safer for not appearing on page 1 of the search results.
Of course this buffer would be created by flooding the Internet with what is essentially garbage content — as if that hasn’t happened already in other realms.
Dynamic DNS could address the issue of filtering out the fake identity web sites by IP address, unleashing a swarm of IP addresses that change hourly, always pointing to the same domain names. Hundreds or thousands of domains would have to be registered for this to be effective, and eventually the searchies would catch on and nuke their asses from the indexes, but it would be righteous fun engaging in the good fight of attempting to protect peoples’ identities from being stolen.
