Who Wants To Know How To Obtain False Identification?
65Hold On To Your Hat
The sheer number of online searches for ID--be that false identification, ID badges for their employees, or a Freudian treatise on the id and the ego--is staggering: 30,400,000 global monthly searches and 6,120,00 local monthly searches.
Those figures are from last night (April 7, 2011) as shown using Google's Traffic Estimator keyword tool.
Why?
Or rather...who?
The numbers in each category of searchers won't likely be pinned down too easily, at least not from this keyboard, but a few possibilities do come to mind:
1. Underage kids looking to get served alcohol.
M previous Hub on this topic, The Online False Identification Industry, mentions the focus on this specific market by some of the websites offering false ID for sale. Young wannabe alcoholics have lusted for plastic identifying them as 21 years of age as long as I can remember--certainly since long before the advent of the Internet. And yeah, a lot of youngsters do in fact have computers and know how to use them.
2. Terrorists.
The hardcore professional terrorism trade no doubt possesses phony ID manufacturing facilities that would put a mere garden variety counterfeiter to shame. However, there are an awful lot of radicalized individuals out there who aren't affiliated with Al Qaeda or Hamas or any other organized terrorist group. Some of them most likely possess enough degree of stupid to be smurfing around on the Internet, looking for aliases.
3. People just plain trying to hide, get away, you name it.
Here's the catchall. Colonel Ghadaffi's mad at you for misspelling his name and you need to get out of Libya? Your ex keeps tracking you down and ruining your credit, not to mention beating up your newest boyfriend? Your have a nice name like Barry Soetoro and need to morph into something more Goth like Barack Hussein Obama? Yes. it's easy to see you might turn to Googling for new ID.
4. Folks who just wanna have fun.
Some of the websites purporting to sell fake identification--but real fake ID, not the fake fake stuff!--attempt to present themselves as deeply innocent businesses willing to produce your new identity as a simple novelty. A harmless exaggeration, maybe, convince your new girlfriend you really are a Nigerian Prince attempting to get his billions out of Nigeria. Or pass yourself off as a CIA agent. Perhaps related to the Rockefellers or some such. True "innocents" perhaps do exist.
Perhaps.
5. Illegal immigrants per se.
There are people from #2 and #3 (above) that fit into this group...but from a pure numbers viewpoint, illegal immigrants definitely "deserve" a category of their own. Phony ID documents abound, ranging from those possessed by Meg Whitman's former housekeeper to the fake driver's license carried by the Mexican national who lost control of his eighteen wheeler in Colorado one fine rainy evening in 2007, smacking it firmly into my water tanker.
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Numbers are fascinating critters. Let's do a little crunching, shall we?
30,400,000 global monthly searches x 12 = 364,800,000 searches annually. In case you hadn't noticed, that's a good bit more than the entire population of these United States of America.
From here, it's all guess work. All righty then, guessing right along, let's posit that for every ten searches, someone, somewhere in the world, gets an actual piece of false identification. (Sure, it might only be 1 in 100. So? Gotta start somewhere.) Then:
364,800,000 x 0.10 = 36,480,000 fibbers out there packing alias documents.
If nine out of ten false identification documents have nothing to do with America and only one in ten wind up inside our borders for whatever reason, then we only have 3,648,000 people added to our numbers every year--who are not who they say they are.
One of whom may just happen to be sitting in the Oval Office as we speak.
How disturbing is that?
Sure, I could be way off on this. Wa-ay off. But so what? What if I'm off by a factor of a thousand to one? That would still leave:
3,648,000 possible fakers x 0.001 = 3,648 New Invisible People out there every year.
It only took one to shoot up Fort Hood...and we knew who he was!
CommentsLoading...
Maybe not all of them, but close enough for government work. So to speak.
Interesting. I remember back when I was in high school kids making fake ID's so they could get in bars. I hadn't thought about it in years.
Here in Oklahoma we changed from the laminated driver's license a few years a go making it harder to make a fake one but I'm sure there are people smarter than me out there that have figured it out.
You forgot illegal aliens, the most prolific user of all.
Pamela N Red: Where there's a will there's a way. You can bet there are some really hard-to-detect forgeries out there.
Will: I didn't really forget them but did get careless in the way I listed the categories. Reckon I should go fix that.
breakfastpop Level 8 Commenter 13 months ago
And just think, all those people vote and skew our elections, commit crimes and receive health care.