Using apartments in the San Fernando Valley and Glendale areas, a shadowy ring of identity thieves has been quietly exploiting a new kind of victim — foreign academics who left the United States years ago but whose Social Security numbers still exist in U.S. databases, a cybercrime expert says.
Criminals are resurrecting these dormant identities and submitting hundreds of applications for bank accounts and credit cards, said David Maimon, director of fraud insights at SentiLink and a professor of criminology at Georgia State University. Fraudsters based in Southern California can maximize credit limits while, unknowingly, victims live on the other side of the world, he said.
Sgt. Frank Diana of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department’s Fraud and Cybercrime Bureau said the county’s organized crime gangs are very good at stealing identities, hiding IP addresses and laundering money to make them difficult to detect.
Diana said local identity crime gangs “do it to make millions of dollars and live in nice houses, all at the expense of taxpayers”. “It’s not their money, but they live like kings.”
Maimon and his colleague Karl Lubenow said they discovered this tactic to steal the IDs of foreign academics through their work at SentiLink, a company that works with financial institutions to verify identities and detect fraud.
Initially, they were asked to check applications for possible impersonations of foreign movie stars and athletes.
Along the way, they say their investigation uncovered something bigger: Hundreds of applications were submitted to major credit issuers in September from a similar set of California street addresses and IP addresses.
As they sifted through the documents, they discovered that in addition to targeting a handful of foreign celebrities, the scammers were impersonating dozens of former foreign academics who came to the United States as early as 1977 and left as recently as 2024.
These scholars must obtain a Social Security number to hold positions on campus such as research or teaching assistants, postdoctoral fellows, or guest lecturers. They no longer live in the United States, but their personal information remains scattered across school databases and credit bureaus, making them prime prey for opportunistic hackers and fraudsters, according to Maimon.
Maimon said if the victimized academics seek to return to the United States, they will face significant debt and crippling credit scores that could prevent them from obtaining jobs or housing. At the same time, financial institutions are taking on debt, which ultimately increases their costs of providing services to all their customers, he added.
Most of the fraudulent applications identified by Maimon originated from apartments at six primary addresses in Van Nuys, North Hollywood, Toluca Lake, Glendale and Thai Township. Maimon said gang members likely used addresses they had access to to pick up credit cards, checks and other sensitive documents in the mail.
The addresses are linked to the Burbank and Glendale areas, which Maimon noted are home to Armenian Power, an organized crime group known for committing sophisticated financial crimes.
He also noted that academics from Armenia’s historical rival Türkiye accounted for about half of all fraudulent applications. The rest pretended to be academics from countries as diverse as Japan, India, the Netherlands, Portugal and Greece.
“them [Armenian Power] “These are individuals who have been involved in identity theft and white-collar crime for the past 15 years or so,” Maimon said. “That leads us to believe that these individuals essentially stole all of these identities and used them to create all of these bank accounts and lines of credit.”
Sgt. Diana said the tactics used by the alleged identity theft ring uncovered by Maimon are consistent with those often used by Armenian criminal groups, which tend to be based in the Burbank and Glendale areas.
Although Diana did not know whether Armenian groups were behind the fraud attempts targeting foreign academics, he said the groups were responsible for a significant portion of organized financial crime in Los Angeles County.
“We encountered a number of sophisticated Armenian criminal groups who are experts in identity theft,” he said. “This is how they make a living [they] Make a lot of money. “
He said the Sheriff’s Department is not currently investigating any cases of identity theft involving foreign academics. A spokesman for the Los Angeles Police Department said the department does not currently have any investigations related to this topic. The Burbank Police Department declined to comment.
He said Maimon did not report his findings to authorities in part out of fear of retaliation from the criminals involved. He said his previous efforts to expose fraudsters resulted in his Social Security number and personal information being posted on the dark web, leading to years of identity theft attempts.
He reported his findings to the affected financial institutions through his capacity as a fraud investigator.
One of the financial institutions, which spoke on condition of anonymity for security reasons, said in a statement that it first realized something was wrong after seeing a series of suspiciously high-value transactions in Los Angeles and Kern counties from accounts in the Glendale area. Most account holders only have addresses going back to 2023 and have very limited credit histories.
The agency said it continues to receive fraudulent applications that exploit the identities of former foreign scholars. Once an application is flagged, the agency asks for additional verification information but rarely receives it.
Diana said major data hacks have exposed the personal information of millions of Americans, which is now easily purchased on the dark web.
In 2024, the Federal Trade Commission received more than 1.1 million identity theft complaints and approximately 2.6 million related fraud complaints, resulting in total financial losses of more than $12.7 billion, according to a report by consumer credit reporting company Experian.
Maimon said artificial intelligence increases the ease with which criminals can commit identity theft.
Once scammers have a victim’s name, date of birth, and Social Security number, they can easily use artificial intelligence tools to generate a photo of a driver’s license or passport. They can even create realistic videos of an AI person holding a photo ID and turning their head from side to side, an additional security requirement for some agencies.
The identity documents and people in this video are fake and it is an example of how artificial intelligence can be used to try to evade the security measures of financial institutions.
Identity fraud cases are notoriously difficult to prosecute because criminals hide behind shady networks of IP addresses. Additionally, there is often a significant delay between the time a fraud is committed and the victim discovers it — often months later when a letter from the debt collection agency is received, by which time the evidence trail may have disappeared, Diane said.
“We were often a day late and a dollar short,” Diana said.
In cases where a foreign scholar’s identity is stolen, the victim may never find out, providing additional protection for the perpetrators in Southern California.
Diana warns all Angelenos to check their credit scores frequently and stay alert for signs of identity theft.
He recommends people target their credit with the three major credit bureaus: Experian, Equifax and TransUnion. This way, if someone attempts to open a fraudulent line of credit, the financial institution will not have access to their credit report and may deny the application.
Finally, if someone is a victim of identity theft, they should report it to the credit bureaus, the Federal Trade Commission and local law enforcement, he said.
