Source: at 17 I was running a black-hat hacker collective and had, through a series of bad choices, got pretty deep into the 'real-world' side of that business:

Source: at 17 I was running a black-hat hacker collective and had, through a series of bad choices, got pretty deep into the 'real-world' side of that business: fraud. The day after my 19th birthday my house was raided by the US Secret Service and the UK Serious Organised Crime Agency in a worldwide coordinated swoop that took in dozens of loosely affiliated people. I have since completely rebuilt my life, so I don't mind anonymously sharing this. Stealing an identity is trivially easy. Society revolves around relationships of trust between organisations and individuals, and the trust runs amazingly deep. The basic information you need to do it is publicly available: date of birth, mother's maiden name (on the birth certificate and parents' marriage certificate respectively, copies available on request from the records office). Carrying out the ID theft takes resources and balls. You'll need to be able to manufacture ID documents, or have access to someone who does. Nowadays you can buy them on one of the onion dark markets. Generally you want a driving license, as this is the easiest to forge form of ID that gets you complete access. Banks, governments, etc. will accept it. Sadly, making driving licenses is not too hard - document security is pretty weak. You'll need to make yourself some ultra-high resolution scans, trace the entire design in illustrator, and then get hold of some printing equipment. You usually want to print on teslin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teslin_(material) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teslin_(material)), and laminate with a high-quality laminator. UV seals can be easily replicated by hacking an epson printer to use modified cartridges with UV pigments injected into them. Holograms can also be replicated by dusting your laminate with interference pigments and reverse-printing in clear ink to fix the design. It can all be done on commodity hardware. With a driving license and dob/mother's maiden name you can then access a huge amount of someone's sensitive information, and more importantly, control their relationships with organisations. I don't want this to be a tutorial, so I'll simply say that with several more pieces of information you can take out credit in someone's name, control their existing accounts (e.g. by adding yourself as a new cardholder), or start causing trouble in their name. A final word of caution. While it's easy to get people's information from government records offices, it's even easier to get it from them personally. We used to call people and social engineer them into giving us their DOB, bank account numbers, secret words, etc. Don't be stupid with your information: never tell someone your data down the telephone unless you called them. Oh, and if you're thinking of committing identity fraud, think again. It's not hard to pull off, but you're not smart enough to do it without getting caught. Everyone gets caught in the end.