Using apartments in the San Fernando Valley and Glendale area, a shadowy group of identity thieves has been quietly exploiting a new type of victim: foreign academics who left the United States years ago but whose Social Security numbers still remain in American databases, according to a cybercrime expert.
Criminals are resurrecting these latent identities and submitting hundreds of applications for bank accounts and credit cards, says David Maimon, head of fraud analysis at SentiLink and professor of criminology at Georgia State University. Scammers based in Southern California can then max out lines of credit while victims unknowingly live on the other side of the world, he says.
Sergeant. Frank Diana of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department's Fraud and Cybercrime Bureau said organized crime networks in the county are highly trained to steal identities, hide their IP addresses and launder their loot so that it is difficult to detect.
Local identity crime rings “do it to make millions of dollars and live in nice houses, all at taxpayer expense,” Diana said. “It's not their money, but they live like kings.”
Maimon and his colleague Karl Lubenow said they discovered this tactic of stealing IDs from foreign academics 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 that were likely to impersonate foreign movie stars and athletes.
In the process, they said, their investigation uncovered something much bigger: hundreds of applications sent to major credit issuers from a set of similar California mailing addresses and IP addresses in September.
As they examined the files, they saw that, in addition to targeting a handful of foreign celebrities, the scammers were posing as dozens of former foreign academics who had arrived in the United States in 1977 and left in 2024.
These scholars were required to obtain Social Security numbers to work on campus in roles as research or teaching assistants, postdoctoral fellows, or visiting professors. They no longer live in the United States, but their personal information remains scattered in school databases and credit bureaus, which Maimon says makes them prime prey for opportunistic hackers and scammers.
If the victimized academics tried to return to the United States, they would find themselves with a huge amount of debt and a crippling credit score that could prevent them from getting a job or housing, Maimon said. Meanwhile, financial institutions are responsible for debt, which can ultimately increase the cost of their services for all customers, he added.
Most of the applications Maimon identified as fraudulent originated from apartments at six key addresses in Van Nuys, North Hollywood, Toluca Lake, Glendale and Thai Town. Members of the criminal network likely use addresses they have access to in order to collect credit cards, checks and other confidential documents sent by mail, Maimon said.
The nexus of these addresses is in the Burbank and Glendale area, which Maimon says is the home of Armenian Power, an organized crime group known for carrying out sophisticated financial crimes.
It also noted that academics from Türkiye, Armenia's historic rival, accounted for about half of all fraudulent applications. The rest posed as scholars from various countries such as Japan, India, the Netherlands, Portugal and Greece.
“They [Armenian Power] “I've been involved in identity theft and white collar crime for the last 15 years or so,” Maimon said. “This leads us to believe that these guys are essentially stealing all of these identities and using them to create all of these bank accounts and lines of credit.”
Sergeant. Diana said the tactics used by the alleged identity theft ring Maimon uncovered align with those typically used by Armenian criminal groups, which tend to be based in the Burbank and Glendale areas.
Although Diana does not know if Armenian groups are behind the fraud attempts targeting foreign academics, she said these groups are responsible for a significant portion of organized financial crime in Los Angeles County.
“We come across many sophisticated Armenian criminal groups that are experts in 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 matter. The Burbank Police Department declined to comment.
Maimon has not reported his findings to authorities, in part for fear of retaliation from the criminals involved, he said. His previous efforts to shed light on scammers led to his Social Security number and personal information being disclosed on the dark web, resulting in years of identity theft attempts, he said.
He has reported his findings to affected financial institutions through his role as a fraud investigator.
One of the financial institutions, which did not want to be identified for security reasons, said in a statement that it first realized something was wrong after seeing a series of suspicious high-dollar transactions in Los Angeles and Kern counties coming from accounts in the Glendale area. Most account holders only had addresses dating back to 2023 and very limited credit history.
The institution said it continued to receive fraudulent applications using the identities of former foreign academics. Once applications are flagged, the institution requests additional verification information, which it rarely receives.
Big data attacks have exposed the personal information of millions of Americans, which is now available for purchase on the dark web, Diana said.
In 2024, the Federal Trade Commission received more than 1.1 million complaints of identity theft and about 2.6 million complaints of related fraud resulting in total financial losses of more than $12.7 billion, according to a report from consumer credit reporting company Experian.
Maimon said artificial intelligence has increased the ease with which criminals can carry out identity theft.
Once scammers obtain the victim's name, date of birth, and Social Security number, they can easily use artificial intelligence tools to generate an image 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 from side to side, which is an additional security requirement at some institutions.
Both the identity document and the person are false in this video, an example of how AI can be used to try to evade security measures in financial institutions.
Identity fraud cases are also notoriously difficult to prosecute, as criminals hide behind a network of shadowy IP addresses. Additionally, there is often a significant delay between the time the fraud is committed and the time the victim finds out, often receiving a letter from a collection agency months later, by which time the evidence trail may have gone cold, Diana said.
“We are often a day late and a dollar short,” Diana said.
In the case of foreign academics' stolen identities, victims may never know, providing even more protection to Southern California perpetrators.
Diana warns all Angelenos to stay alert for signs of identity theft by frequently checking their credit score.
He recommends that 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 not be able to access your credit report and will likely deny the application.
Finally, if someone is a victim of identity theft, they should report it to a credit agency, the FTC and local authorities, he said.
