Many young adults consider fake IDs a rite of passage. Nearly 2 in 5 students in their third year of college admitted to having a fake ID, and about 1 in 8 precollege students admit the same, according to a Psychology of Addictive Behaviors study published in 2007.
Almost two decades later since the study, the popularity of fake IDs hasn’t waned. Almost 7 in 10 Ohio State students said they have used or owned a falsified ID, according to an informal survey in 2021.
Not all fake IDs are created equal, but a sizable number are modeled on identification cards from the same few states. Spokeo used data from IDScan.net‘s 2024 Fake ID Report to identify the five states with the highest prevalence of fake IDs in circulation. IDScan.net‘s report is based on its scans of over 130 million physical IDs, with a minimum of 600,000 scans per state.
cheaply creating images of fake IDs that can be used for online purposes, such as defying age-verification laws online or creating bank accounts to make cryptocurrency exchanges. While AI-generated images of fake IDs are currently specialized for online uses, they indicate an industry keeping pace with modern technologies.
