Supreme Court hears immigrant's ID theft case

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Ignacio Carlos Flores-Figueroa, an undocumented worker from Mexico, made a curious and undeniably bad decision. After working under an assumed name for six years, he decided to use his real name and exchanged one set of phony identification numbers for another....

By MARK SHERMAN

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The outcome of this case will definitely affect me in my job.

I'll have to follow it.

 

Well, yes... ! At the very least he bought stolen property (identity).

Knowingly, or unknowingly, damage is being done to the true owner of the property (identity). How does the user know that the identity DOESN'T belong to someone?

 

There are three main things to using someones identity. Name, address, date of birth and social security number.

All you need is three of the four to usually use that persons identity.

If someone uses a fake name that doesn't correspond to any of the other three pieces, it would be using a fake ID, not ID theft.

The argument is that the illegal immigrant may think it was a fake ID not a real persons info, and then shouldn't fall under the harsher "identity theft" category with the mandatory two year prison term.

Up til now, at least in my area, we've been applying your thinking, they knew it wasn't their ID so they should have assumed it could be someone else's ID, as in a real person, not just made up info.