A dark web shop selling scans of more than 153 million US and Canadian driver’s licenses appears to have drawn its stock from ID checks at car rental counters. The FBI opened an investigation on September 1 into idscan.net, a Louisiana identity verification firm whose scanners sit at roughly 20,000 locations worldwide.
The service, called Nexus, advertised on the Russian-language Exploit forum in late August. It claimed to hold 153 million license images, more than 10 million ID cards, three million travel documents and 579,000 medical cards, and said it had been draining the source database for over a year. Its record count grew by about 400,000 in 24 hours before the site went dark on the evening of September 1, replaced by a note saying it was no longer available.
KrebsOnSecurity tied the leaks to rental desks using timestamps burned into each image. Nine volunteers who searched for their own records had license scans stamped on dates when they traveled or rented cars. Two federal employees said they only handed over their licenses that day at Hertz counters, and one researcher’s scan matched the date of a Hertz rental. The images include infrared and ultraviolet views, a signature of idscan.net gear that scans IDs with both light spectra across more than 21 million verifications a month. Hertz is listed among the company’s clients, and a dispensary chain with an exclusive idscan.net deal matched another victim’s timestamp.
The New Orleans FBI field office opened the probe after the service was found selling the license of an FBI assistant director alongside other senior officials. idscan.net said it is investigating and has not issued a substantive statement, while Hertz did not respond to requests for comment.
