Mystery envelope with 20 Illinois driver’s licenses sent to Indianapolis man
INDIANAPOLIS (WISH) — An Indianapolis man says he was stunned to find more than a dozen driver’s licenses in his mailbox recently.
Inside a large United States Postal Service envelope was another envelope that contained what appears to be 20 state of Illinois driver’s licenses. The return address belongs to Steve Diana but he claims this is the first time he’d seen the envelope.
“And it had a bunch of people’s IDs in there,” said Diana.
According to the USPS tracking, the label on the envelope was created in Indianapolis on July 30 at 1 a.m. and mailed to Cincinnati. On Aug. 1 it was delivered. Nine days later the envelope was returned to Indianapolis marked “return to sender.” When it arrived in Diana’s mailbox he peeled back the label to see if he recognized the name, but he didn’t. He thought someone was trying to pull a fast one on him, so he called I-Team 8.
“I wanted to make sure everything was OK because I really didn’t know what to think when I opened up the envelope and found a bunch of people’s IDs in there,” he said.
Out of the 20 Illinois driver’s licenses in the envelope, all but one have a birth year of 1999, meaning all the people on the IDs just turned 21 years old. All of the addresses listed on the IDs are in Chicago. So I-team 8 reached out to Dave Druker from the Office of the Illinois Secretary of State to give him a virtual look at the licenses.
“It does look pretty good,” said Druker.
But he feels they are fakes and for security reasons he can’t say why.
“Our thought is and we encounter this quite a bit, it is probably people involved in creating fake identifications and fake driver’s licenses in many cases to get into bars,” said Druker.
A search of social media led to a match in names and pictures of about half of the IDs. The people found online mostly live in the Cincinnati area.
So how did an envelope of 20 possibly fake IDs end up in Diana’s mailbox? That’s a great question. I-Team 8 has spoken to state, local and federal law enforcement about the envelope. The Office of the Illinois Secretary of State has their own police department to investigate identity theft and fraud.
“We can run it through the facial recognition and if we did come up with some Illinois people we can take action in that regard,” said Druker.
I-Team 8 will stay on this investigation and updates will be made available online and on WISH-TV.