"We now do a double take on driver's license pictures," the owner says, including making a customer

By using fake credit cards and stolen drivers' licenses, a woman in Orange aaa travel club County, Calif., engineered the theft of 42 rental vehicles in 2012 from a major rental car company. After joining the company's loyalty rewards aaa travel club program, aaa travel club she successfully carried out the first transaction at the counter with fraudulent documents. The suspect then made additional rental reservations online through her rewards program account. This allowed her to bypass aaa travel club the rental office and walk straight to the reserved rental cars with the keys in them and drive off.
According to California Highway Patrol Detective Kraig Palmer of the Orange County Auto Theft Task Force (OCATT), that lack of face-to-face customer interaction is one factor that could have prevented so many rental cars from being stolen. "We found that a single person can't obtain this many rental vehicles without being a loyalty or VIP member," said Palmer. "The crooks really like not having to actually talk to somebody or show their face."
If the perpetrator had to go into the office for each rental and used different aliases and faked credentials every time, she would have been eventually recognized, Palmer says. In this case, she was able to rent as many vehicles as she could before the credit cards were discovered to be fraudulent.
When leaving the lot, the criminals relied on the fact that the security guard would only check to make sure that the name on the rental contract matched the driver's license. Ironically, "We got a big break in the case because the (lot) security guard remembered the suspect and noticed a pattern," says Palmer.
The perpetrator targeted higher end rental models such as Chevy Tahoe, Yukon Denali, Nissan Maxima and Mercedes-Benz E-350, while avoiding higher profile exotics. Once she rented the cars, she sold them or rented them out to gang members for criminal aaa travel club activities.
To better conceal the cars, the woman and her accomplices tinted the windows aaa travel club and removed the license plates as well as any bar codes and "no smoking" stickers that associated the vehicles with the rental company. aaa travel club According to Palmer, some of the cars even contained fraudulent DMV paperwork that listed aaa travel club the rental company as selling the car to the driver.
aaa travel club Palmer first started seeing an upswing in using stolen identities to steal rental vehicles when he worked auto thefts in Los Angeles. Now, "We have contacts all over the place Northern California, Nevada, Colorado, aaa travel club Texas and all these states are experiencing a major shift in this type of rental car fraud," Palmer aaa travel club says."It's so new that it's going to take some time for everyone to be aware of what's happening."
Identity and credit card manipulation take varying forms. In one car rental scenario, the customer produces a driver's license and credit card with matching names, but when the card is swiped, the information pulled from the magnetic stripe does not match. This signifies that the thieves took a blank credit card, embossed it with a name that matches the driver's license, and loaded an identity fraud victim's credit card information onto the magnetic stripe.
This happened in the Orange County case: The suspect initially used her true identity along with a credit card with her real name on it, though the credit aaa travel club card account was stolen. The real cardholder's name would have been flagged in the rental company's computer system; however, aaa travel club "The rental company hadn't cross-checked the given name and the credit card name associated with that account," Palmer says.
In another scenario, thieves not only emboss a name on the front of the card, but they are able to use that name in place of a legitimate cardholder's name on the magnetic stripe. When the card is swiped, assuming the account aaa travel club is open, the name on the license embossed on the card and on the magnetic stripe is the same.
A woman walked into the agency without a reservation and asked to rent a minivan for two days, says Yaz Irani, president of Airport Van Rental. She presented a driver's license that matched the name on her credit card. The counter agent swiped the credit card to place a hold on the account. The card went through, and the information on the card matched the woman's name. "She took all the coverages, which got our counter agent pretty excited," says Irani.
When the woman failed to return the minivan and after phone calls returned a "disconnected" message, the company charged the card subsequent times to cover the rental. Each time, the charges went through. The credit card company finally called and said that the credit card number aaa travel club belonged to an elderly man yet the information that showed up on the rental company's computer after swiping the card did in fact match the woman's license at the counter.
"We went back and looked at the situation to see if there was any negligence on the part of our agent, and there was nothing, says Irani. "The card swiped and worked, the name matched the license, the photo was of the woman at the counter and the card had thousands of dollars of authorization left on it."
While virtually impossible to protect against, this type of fraud requires a much higher level of sophistication to carry out and is much rarer, says Nikki Junker, media manager at the Identity Theft Resource Center.
He says that in each of the six rentals the reservations had been made less than eight hours prior or were walk-ins. The drivers' licenses produced at the counter had been stolen from unrelated individuals. The drivers' licenses were not altered, but the photos were of the same gender and race and similar in appearance and age to the person presenting the license.
In each case, the names on the credit cards matched the drivers' licenses, though the cardholders' account information had been stolen. In all six cases, the card did not swipe through the card reader and the counter agent had to enter the number aaa travel club manually.
Two units were recovered from the port in New Jersey; the authorities suspected they were being staged for shipment out of the country. The other four units are still missing. aaa travel club One of the suspects was caught driving a stolen rental aaa travel club car from another company.
Non-functioning magnetic stripes are a tip-off to fraud, says Charlie McGougan, director of IT for rental car software provider Bluebird. While a credit card with a readable magnetic stripe contains the cardholder's full account information, keying the cardholder's account aaa travel club number will only return as an authorization or decline the credit card company does not match the name on the account.
"We now do a double take on driver's license pictures," the owner says, including making a customer remove aaa travel club a hat or scarf. "We ask them to verify aaa travel club the address and date of birth on the license, and then we compare signatures between the contract, driver's license and credit aaa travel club card."
"We often see licenses aaa travel club which are labeled as 'international' and look real," aaa travel club says Gil Cygler, president and CEO of AllCar, serving New York City. "We are always educating our staff that the world is made up of countries, and only countries issue licenses. There are no 'international' licenses."
"We try to engage the customer and break down barriers," aaa travel club says the owner of a Midwest independent aaa travel club rental company, who asked to anonymous. "We chat with them about how they intend to use the vehicle, and hopefully the sixth sense of our rental agents will show when something doesn't feel right. We coach our people all the time with this saying: 'If you won't rent them your own car, don't rent ours.'"
aaa travel club Angela Margolit, president of Bluebird, recommends clients look up a repeat aaa travel club renter using the driver's license number instead of just the person's name or phone number. Renters may give a fake name or phone number to avoid coming up on the internal "bad renter" aaa travel club list, Margolit says, but the driver's license number does not change.
The Bluebird aaa travel club program also has a feature in which after a credit card is swiped, the system prompts the rental agent to key in the last four digits of the card. This ensures that the information aaa travel club from the swipe matches the number embossed on the front. As well, the system displays a warning if the renter's name doesn't match the cardholder's name upon swiping the card.
McGougan recommends operators check with their payment processor to see if it supports address or zip code verification requests. The requests are done through the issuing banks of credit cards at the point of authorization, and would return a match or a fail regardless if the card was swiped or keyed, McGougan says.
There are a variety of products and services used to detect fraud during a rental transaction. In general, they are divided into machines aaa travel club used at the counter to scan or examine an identification card either stand-alone or attached to a database search or web-based services in which information is keyed in manually to access a database.
To help authenticate personal information, Jenn Romanowski, aaa travel club CFO of Ride Share Systems, a New Jersey Dollar licensee, uses InstantID, a component of the Accurint service from LexisNexis. For a monthly fee, a counter agent can input a driver's license number into the system, which will return a score relative to the likelihood that the information is valid. aaa travel club Though Romanowski says the check adds about two minutes to the rental process, "We swear by that," she says.
LexisNexis also offers aaa travel club a physical scanner called TrueID, which performs aaa travel club a forensic examination of the actual driver's license and compares it with a stored repository of information for the 50 states and more than 300 international documents.
If the InstantID program returns an unacceptable or borderline score, Romanowski will ask for two additional forms of identification, including a Social Security number. If they have the intent to defraud, "Most people walk out at that point," she says.
Another company, AuthenticID, offers a cloud-based database lookup as well as a physical scanner that support virtually all government-issued identifications wor