Impersonation fraud at Acom has risen 1.3-fold compared with last year, the consumer lender said, as forged driver's licences are used to pass identity checks at loan machines and rental counters.
In August, police arrested a man as he completed identity verification at an Acom automatic loan machine. Officers entered the booth during the procedure and led him away, having staked out the machine after learning he had used a forged licence in an earlier loan application.
Acom's Hayakawa Takahiro, a manager at the company's network service center, said the lender is treating the problem as serious. Shown the licence the man had used, he said it was hard to tell from the real thing at a glance, according to FNN Prime Online.
The card carried another person's name and date of birth. "It is a method that takes over someone else's identity entirely," a dealer who sells forged licences said, describing how the fakes are made.
Hyogo police display seized fakes
Hyogo prefectural police last month showed forged licences used in crimes. A man in his 20s living in Nara was arrested and indicted on charges of using a forged licence bearing his own photograph to rent dump trucks from a rental company three times between June and July.
Similar cases have followed. In Kyoto, a company employee in his 50s was arrested and indicted for submitting a forged licence when he was hired.
Expiry dates once gave forgeries away
A licence's expiry date should fall one month after the holder's birthday. In a forgery uncovered the year before last, the birth date read December 18 while the expiry read October 2, an inconsistency that made the fake easy to spot.
Hayakawa said recent forgeries reproduce fine details faithfully, and that the cards show how methods have grown more sophisticated each year.