Wanted: Your name and number

The hijackers in the terrorist attacks were masters of identity theft. Now lawmakers are worried about copycat persona stealing.

By Katharine Mieszkowski

Oct. 2, 2001 | Just three days after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the FBI released the names of 19 men suspected of carrying out the murderous and suicidal hijackings. Not long after, however, doubts surfaced as to the real identities of the kamikaze terrorists. Days later, a trail of stolen passports and very-much-alive hijack suspects led FBI officials to admit that mistakes had been made.

It now appears that at least seven of the Saudi nationals named by the FBI were falsely fingered; these alleged hijackers claim to have been victims of an extreme form of identity theft, known as "identity takeover."

"You cannot imagine what it is like to be described as a terrorist -- and a dead man -- when you are innocent and alive," said a shaken Saeed Al-Ghamdi, 25, quoted in the The Daily Telegraph. Al-Ghamdi, a Saudi Airlines pilot, was singled out by the FBI as one of the terrorists on the United Airlines Flight 93 that crashed in Pennsylvania. He said his reputation was smeared as his name, place and date of birth, occupation and photo were blasted around the world. (CNN later apologized on air for using the image.) Salem Al-Hamzi, 33, an administrator for the Saudi airline who was in Riyadh as the time of the attacks, said he'd never even heard of Pennsylvania, the state where the plane he'd supposedly helped hijack crashed.

There are hundreds of thousands of cases of identity theft reported in the U.S. every year, bur the crime is usually some form of financial fraud, in which the perpetrator procures credit cards in the victim's name and goes on a shopping spree. A celebrated example of this more commonplace kind of identity theft is the case of Anthony Lemar Taylor, who last year used golfer Tiger Woods' Social Security number and date of birth to get a driver's license and credit cards.

But some of the 19 terrorists are now believed to have perpetrated identity theft on an entirely different scale, using stolen passports to adopt the personas of other foreign nationals and live undetected in American society. At a meeting of the U.S. Department of Justice's Identity Theft Subcommittee of the White Collar Crime Task Force last Tuesday, law enforcement officials agreed that this level of identity theft was unlike anything they had seen before.

"Everyone agreed this was a new wrinkle," says Joanna Crane, an attorney with the Federal Trade Commission, a member of the task force. "You have crime rings like the Nigerian bank fraud rings where individuals assume other people's identities for the purposes of defrauding a bank, but they don't live under that person's identity. These guys had done what's called an 'identity takeover,' living completely under the name of another person, with driver's licenses, passports, bank accounts, phone accounts -- everything that identifies you."

In the wake of the terrorist attacks, calls for new methods of safeguarding personal identities have come from every corner. Oracle Corporation CEO Larry Ellison has suggested the creation of new national identity cards in hopes of preventing identity-theft subterfuge. But the lawyers, government officials and advocates who fight identity theft doubt that such a system would have helped prevent the attacks, and they also fear that the publicity given to identity theft since Sept. 11 will actually increase the incidence of it.

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