A Short History of Identity (and Fraud)
(And You Thought It Was Just About Credit Cards)
MORTICIAN: Who’s that then?
CUSTOMER: I don’t know.
MORTICIAN: Must be a king.
CUSTOMER: Why?
MORTICIAN: He hasn’t got shit all over him.
—MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL
On a gloriously crisp day in February 1910, the prince of Abyssinia and his entourage were welcomed with fanfare aboard the mighty British battleship Dreadnought. The captain and his entire crew turned out in dress whites in honor of their guests. During this visit the prince and his retinue were treated with all the respect due to people of their standing, and the captain personally conducted a tour of the great warship. Reports of the day indicate they departed to an especially stirring rendition of “God Save the King.”
It was revealed the following day to be an elaborate hoax. The prince of Abyssinia wasn’t a prince at all—he was one among a group of young upper-crust pranksters wearing blackface. (Another of them was a young woman named Adeline Virginia Stephen, who would later be known as the rising literary talent Virginia Woolf.)
Reliable mechanisms for verifying a person’s identity are a relatively recent development. But the quest for such systems is much longer, and it makes for a fascinating story—and the evolution of identity over some 10,000 years is only the first part of it. We must not allow today’s pandemic of identity theft to be the punch line.
Identity theft is as old as the Bible. In Genesis, Jacob covered himself with goatskins and impersonated his brother, Esau, to trick their father into giving him the blessing of the firstborn, which bestowed upon him all the family property—and, some say, resulted in the strife that has plagued the Middle East for thousands of years.
A thousand years ago, a person could become almost anyone they wanted to be simply by claiming to be that person. Today, armed with enough personally identifiable information (birth dates, maiden names, previous addresses, phone numbers, credit profiles, and Social Security numbers), a person can go online and become almost anyone they want, simply by typing in the right information.
And your name is … ? And you do what?
While you are unique, your name isn’t. In many cases, individuals may share their name with hundreds or even thousands of other people. Your name is little more than a label that has been affixed to your life, and that name alone is not sufficient to prove you are who you claim to be. However, for thousands of years, a name was the only means we had to identify a specific person.
The quest for individual identity began when Adam and Eve began their begetting. Anthropologists believe that members of the most primitive societies were first identified by the specific sounds they made. A mimicked version of those sounds became the way they were known; it became their name.
“Hey, there’s E-Ee-E-EeEEEee over there!”
Surprisingly, while we take it for granted that everyone in the world has a name, there is no universally accepted standard for the common usage of those names.
Thousands of years ago, when people tended to stay in the general area where they were born, and lived among a small group of people, a first name was sufficient (“You can call me Paul!”). But as populations grew, and two or more people had the same first name, additional identifiers were needed, so people became known by their occupation or where they lived, an accomplishment in battle or who their father was. During his lifetime, Jesus Christ was known as Jesus of Nazareth, or Jesus, son of Joseph. Only after his death did he become known as Jesus Christ, with “Christ” being the translation of the Hebrew word meaning “Messiah.” So, he was then referred to as Jesus, Christ the Messiah, rather than the name we know him by today. While there were many Leonardos, the one we remember and honor is Leonardo of the town of Vinci—Leonardo da Vinci.
Eventually, second names—surnames—became the accepted means of identifying people. Different cultures had different rules for surnames. In Europe, a person went by their first, middle, and last—or family—name. In China, the family name comes first and the given name comes last. In many Spanish-speaking countries, the family name is in the middle position. Sikh men and most Sikh women share the same last name, making identification by name difficult. In some societies, when women marry it is customary that they take their husband’s family name; in other cultures they do not.
Last names finally became an accepted part of standard usage in Western cultures during the 1600s. By that time, cities had grown larger, churches began recording marriages and baptisms, armies started to keep detailed records, and nonroyals became participants in the economic system, so it finally became necessary for institutions to be able to identify specific individuals.
Yet accomplishing this was easier said than done. Most people didn’t have identity documents—why would they?—and photography hadn’t been invented. The only possible means of positively identifying a specific individual was through eyewitness identification. Someone else who knew that person was required to confirm their identity, and that simply didn’t happen very often. So a person could easily assume the identity of whomever he or she wanted to be.
After the Roman emperor Nero committed suicide, several men alleged that his death had been faked, and each claimed to be the former emperor. One enterprising imposter even formed a small militia and became a pirate. Eventually he was caught and beheaded.
Following Joan of Arc’s execution, a number of people alleged that at the last second another woman had been substituted for Joan of Orléans and burned at the stake in her place. One of these imposters was positively identified as Joan by her brothers and continued her charade for almost five years, being welcomed by nobles and receiving expensive gifts during that time.
Continuing for several thousand years into modern Western civilization, there was no way of definitively identifying an individual. That stretch of time is replete with fascinating tales of imposters.
George Psalmanazar became quite famous throughout Northern Europe in 1700 as the first native of Taiwan—then known as Formosa—to visit Europe. He spun chilling yarns about life in his distant homeland, claiming that Formosans were polygamous and permitted by law to eat their wives as punishment for infidelity. After six years, and the publication of his book, An Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa, he revealed that it had been a hoax.
Perhaps the best-known imposter is the Frenchman Martin Guerre. In 1538, Guerre disappeared, and eight years later a man showed up claiming to be him. Guerre’s wife accepted him as her husband and lived with him for three years, bearing two children. When Guerre sued an uncle for his family inheritance, he was accused of being a fraud. The case went through several trials and appeals. It appeared he would be vindicated, but then the real Martin Guerre returned, having lost a leg while serving in the Spanish army. The imposter was executed.
While modern imposters are required to produce an array of facts and documents to support their false identities, that hasn’t stopped them. Among the most successful were the “Great Imposter,” Ferdinand Demara, who stole a range of identities from that of a Trappist monk to that of a Canadian Navy surgeon, and Frank Abagnale Jr., who conned his way to millions of dollars by posing as a Pan Am pilot, a doctor, and a prosecutor, as told in the book and movie, Catch Me If You Can.
The first steps toward being able to positively identify an individual began early in the 1800s with the establishment of municipal police forces, which needed to identify suspects and criminals. Centuries earlier, the Romans and Greeks would tattoo or brand prisoners, while the Chinese would cut off a finger or a limb. (“That’ll be one tattoo, please.”) Tattoos were very useful for identification. The Maori of New Zealand had symbols tattooed on their faces. Each person’s symbols—called “mokos”—were unique, and the same symbol was used to identify the owner of land or even drawn as a signature whenever a written contract was required. Perhaps not surprisingly, written signatures have never been especially valued for identification. As far back as the era of Socrates, criminals have been forging documents.
While individuals had little need to be identified, with the exception of proving identity in inheritance cases, increasingly urbanized societies had a growing need to accurately identify specific individuals. Various methods employed by the police gradually became adopted throughout society. One of the initial methods employed by law enforcement, as recounted in Les Misérables, was to have people with photographic memories visit prisons regularly to look at all the new arrivals to see if there was a repeat offender they recognized and to commit the faces of the new prisoners to memory.
Actual photography was first used in Belgian prisons in the 1840s—the birth of the mug shot. However, the quality of pictures was so poor at that time, prisoners needed only to make faces—mug at the camera—to foil that form of identification. There was also no practical way to reproduce these pictures. As it was virtually impossible to check every previously existing photo, there was little value in using photographs for identification. Criminals simply would provide false names as well as employ various methods to alter their physical appearance in order to beat the rap. Criminal identification clearly had a ways to go.
The first widely accepted means of proving the identity of a known criminal was invented by the Frenchman Alphonse Bertillon in 1879. The Bertillon system, as it became known universally, was a compilation of eleven different body measurements, including the spread of an individual’s arms, the length of the left foot, and the circumference of the skull above the eyes. It also noted body markings, including tattoos. While this system certainly wasn’t precise, the odds of two people having the same Bertillon measurements were said to be about 300 million to one. For more than two decades, the Bertillon system remained the accepted means of identification throughout Europe and the United States, and might have stayed that way if a man named Will West hadn’t been convicted of murder and sent to Leavenworth prison in 1903.
According to legend, when West’s Bertillon measurements were taken, officials discovered that there was another inmate at the same prison, also named Will West, who was serving a life sentence for murder. The two men had almost exactly the same measurements. As it turned out, Will West One and Two—who were unknown to each other—were identical twin brothers. The only difference between the two men was their fingerprints. The next day, Leavenworth Prison officials began to rely on fingerprints as the primary means of proving identification, and within months most other American prisons followed suit.
Fingerprints have been used in various places and at different times throughout history as a means of determining a person’s identity. In third-century China, merchants used fingerprints in wax to seal business contracts. In fourteenth-century Persia, government documents required a fingerprint seal. As early as 1686, a professor of anatomy at Italy’s University of Bologna, Marcello Malpighi, noted and named the characteristics common to all fingerprints, including ridges, whorls, and spirals. In 1858, British chief magistrate Sir William Herschel, working in India, began insisting that Indians seal contracts with a fingerprint in addition to a signature as a means of ensuring they would not attempt to repudiate the agreement. It took some time to gain universal acceptance, but eventually the Herschels of the world came to believe that no two prints were exactly alike, and it was possible to identify an individual simply by comparing his fingerprint to a known sample. So, fingerprints became the accepted means of proving identity.
It was almost twenty-five years later, in 1882, that an employee of the U.S. Geological Survey working in New Mexico stamped his own fingerprint on a document to guard against forgery. It was the first documented time a fingerprint had been used to prove identity in the New World. A year later, Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi told the story of a murderer who is identified by the use of fingerprints.
In 1892, Argentinean police officer Juan Vucetich successfully matched a bloody fingerprint found on the doorpost at a murder scene to the mother of the two victims. It was the first attempt to use fingerprints to identify a killer, and it proved to be accurate: The woman confessed. Exactly a decade later, the famed Alphonse Bertillon, who by this time had become the director of the Paris Police Department’s Bureau of Identification, successfully matched a fingerprint found at a crime scene to prints on file—the first time a fingerprint had been used to solve a crime in which there was no suspect. Doubtless the irony was not lost on Bertillon, whose own detective work contributed to the demise of the eponymous system of identification that made him famous.
Faking or hiding fingerprints is much more difficult than forging signatures or making faces at a camera. Many people have tried, but, almost without exception, they failed. Some of the more interesting fugitives of fingerprint justice include John Dillinger, who in 1934 dipped his fingers in acid in a failed attempt to destroy his fingerprints, and Colombian drug lord Daniel “El Loco” Barrera, who tried the same method—with the same failed results—in 2012. Another criminal sliced off his fingertips, then literally had his fingers sewn to his chest—where the skin has no ridges—until they healed, leaving him without fingerprints. He was caught: His recorded prints included an impression of the lines and swirls below the first joint, which were used to match the prints and prove his identity. Another felon in hiding cut the skin off his fingertips, sliced it into smaller pieces, and then put those pieces back on his fingers in a different arrangement, creating entirely new and bizarre prints. He was also caught: An FBI fingerprint expert cut up photographs of the new prints, then painstakingly reassembled them as if solving a gigantic jigsaw puzzle.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, with the invention of the automobile and the airplane, the positive identification of an individual became a more pressing issue. For the first time, it was possible for ordinary people to travel routinely beyond their towns to places where they weren’t known by neighbors or local merchants, where they had to prove their identity to strangers. And, as there had never been a need to do that, there was no way of doing it. Con men similar to The Music Man’s fictional Harold Hill moved easily from town to town, making outrageous claims and selling their fraudulent products, then slipping out of town on the midnight express before the latest scam could be uncovered.
The use of documents as a means of identification became relatively common in the early 1900s. While birth certificates had been issued throughout history almost exclusively to the children of nobles to maintain aristocratic lineage and ensure inheritances, most other births were simply registered at the parish church or, when necessary, city hall. In many parts of the United States, birth certificates, which most people assume have always served as an important legal record, were not regularly issued until World War II.
All the information or documents that we use to confirm our identity these days—Social Security numbers, driver’s licenses, birth certificates, even passports—are modern creations.
The driver’s license, probably the most commonly accepted form of identification, originally had absolutely nothing to do with an individual’s ability to drive, and in most states wasn’t even mandatory. The initial purpose of a driver’s license was to raise tax dollars. Only people driving for commercial purposes—cab and truck drivers—were required to obtain licenses, because the government had the right to tax and regulate commerce. It didn’t extend to noncommercial uses. In fact, when the state of Illinois attempted to force drivers to obtain and carry licenses, the Illinois Supreme Court ruled that it was an “unjustifiable, unconscionable and unconstitutional intrusion on the rights of individuals to travel upon the public highways unhindered and unimpaired.”
It wasn’t until the middle of the twentieth century that most states began requiring individuals to get a driver’s license, which was about the time that licenses began to be used and accepted as a manifestation of identification. States then began requiring more information on a license, and some states didn’t add photographs until the 1980s.
Ironically, the Illinois decision was never repealed or overturned, which means that the Illinois state law prohibiting people from driving without a license might just be unconstitutional.
Passports have a long and appropriately murky history, dating back to the Old Testament when King Artaxerxes of Persia gave an adviser a letter addressed “to the governors beyond the river,” requesting the adviser’s safe passage across their lands. While no one knows for certain, the word “passport” is believed to have referred to passage through the gates of a city entrance—the “porte”—although many assume it had something to do with seaports. England’s Henry V is given credit for the creation of the modern passport in 1414—a document that served as a record of places visited as well as an identification document. In 1858, Britain recognized the passport as an identification document, although it was still not required for international travel.
Prior to World War I, few European nations required a passport to enter or leave the country, but at the beginning of the war, countries began enforcing passport regulations as a means of detecting spies. It was during this period that photographs were first attached to passports.
Later, as World War II spread through Europe, passports took on an entirely new meaning. The words, “Your documents please,” became a chilling reminder of how vulnerable an individual could be if he or she had the wrong identity. Papers that proved an “acceptable” identity became extremely valuable during the Nazis’ Final Solution. In numerous cases, possession of a forged passport literally meant the difference between life and death, and the creation of documents that would pass inspection became an art.
The use of documents to authenticate identity isn’t foolproof, because they can be forged. With an officially stamped photograph, a passport can be faked, which is why fingerprints became so important for making a positive identification.
The first Social Security number was issued in November 1936. A precursor to the American Express mantra, people tended to never leave home without their Social Security card. For a while, some people even had their number tattooed on their body in plain sight. Few bothered to take precautions to protect their SSN. While important to each individual, it had little value to anyone else. In fact, several decades passed before banks began using it for identification purposes. Eventually, however, the Social Security number became associated with checking accounts, credit cards, and mortgages—indeed, all forms of credit transactions. And with that transition, the Social Security number became enormously more important.
Knowing a Social Security number and the name associated with it opened the door to a treasure trove of personal information that could be used for various illegal purposes. For criminals, a Social Security number became the gift that kept on giving, and, for victims, the curse that kept on taking. Once they had your number and enough information about you to answer a few questions—where you were born, your mother’s maiden name, and so on—they could and did do whatever they wanted in your name.
Before e-commerce and social networking made identity theft a big player in twenty-first-century crime, the most common form of identity caper was when underage students used fake identification to get served in bars. That began to change in the mid-1970s, when, according to Secret Service lore, a group of Nigerian students with expiring visas were determined to find a way to remain in the United States. By buying, stealing, forging, or simply finding documentation, they were able to create new identities that enabled them to successfully evade the authorities. Once the ability to create new identities spread, it was only a matter of time before people started using them to commit financial crimes or worse.
An individual’s identity no longer had a direct connection to what a person looked like, or whether their fingerprints matched a sample, or whether they were even a person—human beings distinguished by numbers and facts on file had no flesh and blood, and they could be in the next room, or on the other side of the world, and no one would ever know. They were collections of information—their existence was a composite of stolen numbers and discrete facts. Individual identity was unguarded everywhere, ripe for the picking, and as a result every piece of personal and financial information that became available to those smart enough to figure out how to exploit it began to find their way into the identity thief’s tool kit.
In 1983, the discovery of the polymerase chain reaction suddenly made DNA profiling available and affordable. DNA made it possible, for the first time in history, to identify a specific individual almost to the exclusion of every other person in the world.
In the early 1980s, law enforcement personnel in England were able to extract a DNA sample from the body of a murder victim, but found no obvious suspects to try to match it to. British police asked the male residents of the town in which the victim was found to voluntarily offer a DNA sample. Those samples were tested for their DNA signature, but no match was found. Then someone informed the authorities that a friend admitted to providing urine instead. When this friend’s actual DNA was tested, it matched the DNA found on the victim’s body. With that, DNA became the accepted means of proving an individual’s identity. Even in complex inheritance cases, in which fingerprints play no role, a familial relationship could be proven or disproven. After thousands of years, it had finally become possible for an individual to prove his or her identity beyond the shadow of a doubt.
The centuries-long saga in which identity was something one could fake or forage off a gravestone, totally impervious to challenge, had come to an end. This conclusive method for positively identifying individuals tracked closely with a startling new application of a totally different kind of technology, one that fundamentally changed the way we live and the meaning of identity: computers.
Until the dawn of the digital age, an individual’s identity actually had little value, so little, in fact, that few people bothered to take the precautions necessary to protect the sensitive personal information required to prove they were who they claimed to be. Frankly, it was too much trouble for too little purpose. Worst case, someone would lose a credit card, or have it stolen, and the thief would charge up a storm. It was a nuisance that might end up costing the victim a few bucks, but it wasn’t a life-changing event. Even if someone did manage to steal the identity of another, there wasn’t a whole lot they could do with it anyway.
As is generally the way on the march of progress, the moment social systems and commerce created the means for an individual to authenticate his or her unique identity, criminals discovered ways to exploit those same systems to make that identity extraordinarily valuable. The rise of digital everything was a great boon. Slowly at first, but then in a great wave of acceptance, people began putting their entire lives into cyberspace. They did their banking and paid bills, shopped with credit cards, joined community forums, met people, posted photographs, shared their innermost secrets, and freely identified many of their contacts on multiple public websites. In so doing, they unwittingly created a complete online persona—a cyber version of themselves.
The digital footprint emerged as a concept, and then as a means of identification. In response, a new type of crime—identity theft—took flight, and it morphed into something well beyond the use of stolen identification to compromise a credit account. Once an identity thief captured an individual’s Social Security number and compiled a sufficient amount of personally identifiable information to convincingly impersonate the victim, there was almost nothing he or she couldn’t or wouldn’t do.