Using apartments in the San Fernando Valley and Glendale area, a shadowy group of identity thieves has been quietly exploiting a new kind of victim — foreign scholars who left the U.S. years ago but whose Social Security numbers still linger in American databases, according to a cybercrime expert.
Criminals are resurrecting these dormant identities and submitting hundreds of applications for bank accounts and credit cards, says David Maimon, head of fraud insights at SentiLink and a criminology professor at Georgia State University. The Southern California-based fraudsters can then max out lines of credit while unknowing victims live halfway across the world, he says.
Sgt. Frank Diana, with the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department Fraud and Cyber Crimes Bureau, said organized crime rings in the county are highly skilled at stealing identities, concealing their IP addresses and laundering their loot to make it hard to detect.
Local identity crime rings “are doing it to make millions of dollars, live in nice houses, all at the expense of taxpayers,” Diana said. “It’s not their money, but they’re living like kings.”
Maimon and his colleague Karl Lubenow said they uncovered this tactic of stealing foreign scholars’ IDs through their work at SentiLink, a company that works with financial institutions to verify identities and detect fraud.
At first they were asked to examine applications where foreign movie stars and athletes were probably being impersonated.
In the process, they said, their investigation unearthed something much larger: hundreds of applications submitted to major credit issuers from a set of similar California street addresses and IP addresses in September.
As they sifted through the files, they saw that, in addition to targeting a handful of foreign celebrities, the fraudsters were impersonating scores of former foreign scholars who had come to the U.S. as long ago as 1977 and left as recently as 2024.
These scholars were required to obtain Social Security numbers to work on campus in roles such as research or teaching assistants, postdoctoral fellows or visiting lecturers. They are no longer living in the U.S., but their personal information remains scattered across school databases and credit bureaus, which according to Maimon makes them prime prey for opportunistic hackers and fraudsters.
Should victimized scholars seek to return to the U.S., they would encounter a massive pile of debt and a crippling credit score that could prevent them from gaining work or housing, Maimon said. Meanwhile, financial institutions are liable for the debt, which can ultimately increase the cost of their services to all customers, he added.
Most of the applications that Maimon identified as fraudulent originated at apartments at six key addresses in Van Nuys, North Hollywood, Toluca Lake, Glendale and Thai Town. It’s likely that crime ring members use addresses they have access to so that they can pick up credit cards, checks and other sensitive documents sent in the mail, Maimon said.
The nexus of these addresses falls in the Burbank and Glendale area, which Maimon points out is the home of Armenian Power, an organized crime group known for conducting sophisticated financial crimes.
He also noted that scholars from Turkey, Armenia’s historical rival, accounted for about half of all fraudulent applications. The remainder were impersonating scholars from a variety of countries such as Japan, India, the Netherlands, Portugal and Greece.
“They [Armenian Power] have been involved in identity theft and white-collar crime for the last 15 years or so,” Maimon said. “It leads us to believe that these guys are essentially stealing all these identities and using them in order to create all those bank accounts and credit lines.”
Sgt. Diana said that the tactics used by the alleged identity theft ring that Maimon discovered align with those often used by Armenian crime groups, which tend to be based in the Burbank and Glendale areas.
Although Diana does not know whether Armenian groups are behind fraud attempts targeting foreign scholars, he said these groups are responsible for a significant portion of organized financial crime in L.A. County.
“We run into a lot of sophisticated Armenian crime groups that are experts on identity theft,” he said. “That’s what they do for a living and [they] make a lot of money.”
The Sheriff’s Department is not currently investigating any identity theft cases involving foreign scholars, he said. A spokesperson for the Los Angeles Police Department said the department did not currently have any investigations related to this topic. The Burbank Police Department declined to comment.
Maimon has not reported his findings to authorities, in part due to fear of retaliation from the criminals involved, he said. His previous efforts to shine a light on fraudsters led to his Social Security number and personal information being released on the dark web, resulting in years of identity theft attempts, he said.
He has reported his findings to the affected financial institutions through his role as a fraud investigator.
One of the financial institutions, which did not wish to be named due to security concerns, said in a statement that it first realized something was awry after seeing a series of suspicious high-dollar transactions in L.A. and Kern counties coming from accounts in the Glendale area. The majority of the account holders only had addresses dating back to 2023 and very limited credit history.
The institution said it was continuing to receive fraudulent applications using the identities of former foreign scholars. Once applications are flagged, the institution asks for additional verification information, which it very rarely receives.
Major data hacks have exposed millions of Americans’ personal information, which is now readily available for purchase on the dark web, Diana said.
In 2024, the Federal Trade Commission received more than 1.1 million identity theft complaints and about 2.6 million complaints of related fraud resulting in total financial losses of more than $12.7 billion, according to a report by consumer credit reporting company Experian.
Maimon said that artificial intelligence has increased the ease with which criminals can carry out identity theft.
Once fraudsters have obtained a victim’s name, date of birth and Social Security number, they can easily use AI tools to generate a picture of a driver’s license or passport. They can even create a realistic-looking video of an AI person holding the photo ID and turning their head side to side, which is an additional security requirement at some institutions.
Both the ID and the person are fake in this video, an example of how AI can be used to try to evade security measures at financial institutions.
Identity fraud cases are also notoriously difficult to prosecute as criminals hide behind a web of shadowy IP addresses. In addition, there is typically a significant delay between when fraud is committed and when the victim finds out — often by receiving a letter from a collection agency months later, at which point the evidence trail may have gone cold, Diana said.
“We’re often a day late and a dollar short,” Diana said.
In the case of the foreign scholars’ stolen identities, the victims may never find out, providing even more protection for the Southern California perpetrators.
Diana warns all Angelenos to remain vigilant for signs of identity theft by frequently checking their credit score.
He recommends people lock their credit at the three major credit bureaus, Experian, Equifax and TransUnion. That way, if someone tries to open a fraudulent line of credit, the financial institution will be unable to access their credit report and probably will deny the application.
Lastly, if anyone is a victim of identity theft, they should report it to a credit bureau, the FTC and local law enforcement, he said.
