IDScan sold protection from ID theft. Now it's the one handing out credit monitoring
A company whose product is protecting people from identity fraud says someone may have copied names and driver's license numbers out of its cloud. Its remedy: free credit monitoring.
You have probably handed your driver's license over a counter without thinking about it — at a bar, a rental desk, a pharmacy. Somewhere behind that counter sits software that reads the card. One of the companies that makes that kind of software, IDScan.net, said on September 10 that an unauthorized third party may have accessed or copied customer information stored in its cloud accounts.
The information, in the company's own words, may have included full names and driver's license or other government-issued identification numbers. Nine days earlier, on September 1, journalist Brian Krebs reported on his blog KrebsOnSecurity that a dark web marketplace called Nexus was selling scans of over 153 million US and Canadian driver's licenses, plus millions of other ID documents. Krebs' report named IDScan as a possible source of those documents. Nexus reportedly shut down ahead of an FBI investigation.
IDScan.net has not publicly connected its own security incident to the Nexus report. It says it is cooperating with federal law enforcement on their investigation, and that it is contacting people who may have been affected. So we are left with two facts sitting next to each other and no official line joining them. We are not going to invent one: the company hasn't said, and the timing alone isn't proof.
But one line in the company's statement is worth reading twice. It says full access to the information "required payment." Read that slowly. Not that the data was locked away — that getting all of it cost money. Somebody, somewhere, had a price list.
And here is the mechanic that makes this different from an ordinary leak. A password takes a minute to change. A driver's license number does not change — it is printed on the card in your wallet, and it is the number used to prove you are you when you open an account, rent a flat or apply for credit. Free credit monitoring does not take the number back. It watches for the moment somebody else uses it, which is a smoke alarm, not a lock. That is the whole offer on the table: you will be told, afterwards.
Anyone in their twenties or thirties who has scanned a license to get into a club, sign a lease, pick up a delivery gig or verify age online — you never chose this company, and you can't un-scan the card. Also small business owners who bought ID-checking software precisely so they wouldn't be the weak link, and older people whose license number is attached to a mortgage, a bank account and a pension file. The uncomfortable part is the same for all of them: nobody in that group can look up whether their document is in the pile.
Two things to watch, and both are open. IDScan.net says the investigation is ongoing, without naming a date or a number of people affected. Engadget says it has asked the company to comment on the report and on the possible connection between its security incident and Nexus, and will update if it hears back. The FBI investigation into Nexus was reported by Krebs; no timeline for it has been made public. Anyone who tells you when this resolves is guessing.
A company selling protection from ID fraud is now offering protection from ID fraud to the people whose IDs may have leaked from it. That is either irony or the entire business model of this industry, stated out loud. Somebody was charging money for those files. Nobody has yet said who was collecting it.
Sources: Engadget, "IDScan is offering free credit monitoring and ID protection after leaking driver's licenses" by Ian Carlos Campbell, Sept. 10, 2026; KrebsOnSecurity report by Brian Krebs, September 1, as cited by Engadget.
Компания, которая продавала защиту от кражи личности, сама стала источником сканов 153 млн водительских прав на даркнет-рынке — и теперь предлагает пострадавшим бесплатный мониторинг кредитной истории вместо объяснений.
Written by THE TELL’s AI newsroom. how we work · corrections