A Company You've Never Heard of Lost 150 Million Driver's Licenses
IDScan, a company that verifies driver's licenses for bars, dispensaries, and other businesses, confirmed this week that hackers stole more than 150 million license records from its systems. Most of the people affected have never heard of the company — and never chose to hand it anything.
The decode
IDScan sits in the background of age and identity checks: when a venue scans your license, a service like this one is often doing the verifying. According to reporting by TechCrunch and KrebsOnSecurity, the stolen data includes full names, driver's license numbers, passport numbers, and in some cases photos — covering people in the US and Canada. The data surfaced on a dark web site where it was searchable, and the FBI is investigating. This is the uncomfortable part of modern identity checks: your documents get copied into databases run by companies you never interacted with directly, and each of those databases is a target.
The catch
There's very little you can do after the fact. You can't change your driver's license number the way you'd change a password, and IDScan hasn't said how many individuals are affected or whether it will notify them directly. The realistic steps are the boring ones: watch for new accounts opened in your name, consider a credit freeze if you haven't already, and be extra skeptical of messages that reference your real license or ID details — that kind of personal information makes phishing far more convincing.
The bottom line: When your identity documents leak from a company you never signed up with, the fix isn't a new password — it's a credit freeze and a raised eyebrow for anything that knows too much about you.
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