Fake IDs join textbooks and shower caddies on the college packing list, find popularity

Once a student receives their fake ID in the mail, they may not think twice about the supply chain that provided it. Behind the scenes, the Ohio Investigative Unit is tasked with finding and stopping the sellers of false identification documents.

The unit operates within Ohio, which means fake IDs that originate from websites overseas are out of its jurisdiction. In these instances, the OIU passes cases on to other agencies. In recent years though, the OIU has located and charged Ohio-based fake ID operations.

On Oct. 22, 2015, an employee at McMurray’s Pub in Springfield, Ohio, collected a few fake IDs and alerted authorities. Agents gathered the IDs, two of which appeared to be Ohio driver’s licenses.

On Oct. 27, 2015, agents interviewed a student at Wittenberg University who said he gave his friend money to purchase fake IDs off of Reddit. Agents explored the Reddit thread and found posts about a person who specializes in making fake Ohio IDs, allowing customers to pay via bitcoin and discretely mailing the IDs.

The seller, a vendor on Reddit, had the username “TedDanzigSR” and through a quick Google search, agents found a YouTube video demonstrating the quality of the fake IDs.

On Jan. 12, 2016, agents used a fictitious email address to purchase the first of many IDs throughout the investigation from the seller for 0.7704 Bitcoin — or $310 — according to the incident report. The order was also placed under a fictitious name and a covert address.

The fake Ohio driver’s license arrived taped between two baseball cards. Agents were not immediately able to determine a return address but narrowed the sender’s location down to the Toledo, Ohio, area through an IP address, according to the incident report. 

The person behind TedDanzigSR, revealed as Mark Simon, was a postgraduate student at the University of Toledo. He had previously sold IDs on a dark web market called Silk Road before the site was shut down by the federal government in 2013. In 2014, he created a new website that could only be accessed through a certain browser, concealing an individual’s identity online, according to the incident report. 

Agents gained access to TedDanzigSR’s Reddit records and monitored his posts, revealing both public and private messages. Among these messages were correspondence between TedDanzigSR and another fake ID vendor about manufacturing operations and the number of people each supplier employs.