Strengthening SIF detection: Leveraging social media footprints

Identity crime has occurred since ancient times. Numerous cases exist in Greece, Persia and the Roman Empire, where impostors assumed false identities to achieve political or financial gain. In the sixth century BC, an imposter assumed the identity of the brother of the shah, Smerdis, who had already been killed. He ruled for several months before being discovered and removed from the throne.i In the Roman Empire, after the death of Emperor Nero, several imposters tried to assume his identity before being discovered and executed.ii When the Minimum Drinking Age Act of 1984 was introduced in the United States, college students started to acquire fraudulent identification documents (IDs) to establish that they were 21 years of age or older.iii In this case, they committed identity crimes to obtain goods and services illegally, not for financial gain.