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Why physical ID theft is harder to fix than credit card fraud
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It started with a voicemail from a Hertz rental car location in Miami, Florida. A 57-year-old woman in Los Alamitos, California, was asked when she planned to return a Mercedes-Benz she had never rented. A thief had stolen her driver’s license, replaced the photo with their own and used it to rent the vehicle. The same identity was used to open a credit card account, book airline tickets and reserve hotel stays. By the time she learned what happened, the fraud involved businesses in multiple states.
Clearing her name required police reports in two jurisdictions, written disputes with the credit card issuer and repeated contact with the rental company and hotels. Her accounts were frozen while she submitted notarized copies of her identification and signed fraud affidavits. The process lasted more than a week. She reported losing $78,500 and spent nearly 10 days dealing with the fallout from one stolen ID.
Credit card fraud is usually limited to a single account number. Physical ID theft gives someone the ability to act as you in the real world. As a result, the cleanup process is longer, more intrusive and often tied to your legal record.
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5 MYTHS ABOUT IDENTITY THEFT THAT PUT YOUR DATA AT RISK
A stolen driver’s license can allow someone to rent cars, open accounts and sign contracts in your name. (Photo by Silas Stein/picture alliance via Getty Images)
How credit card fraud recovery works
Under the Fair Credit Billing Act, you report unauthorized charges to the card issuer within 60 days of the statement date. Federal law limits your liability to $50, and most major issuers waive that entirely. The bank cancels the compromised card number, issues a replacement and removes the disputed charges after an investigation. You may need to confirm transactions and sign a fraud affidavit. The account number changes. Your name, driver’s license and Social Security number stay the same. In most cases, fraud is resolved within one or two billing cycles. That structure gives consumers clarity. There is one issuer, one investigation and one account to correct.
Why physical ID theft recovery is more complicated
Physical ID theft creates problems that go far beyond one financial account. When someone uses your driver’s license, they step into your legal identity. Start with reporting requirements. Most states require you to file a police report before the DMV will issue a replacement linked to fraud. That report number becomes part of your official record. If the misuse happened in another state, you may need to file a second report there.
Next, understand what replacing the card actually does. A new physical card does not erase prior activity. Rental contracts, utility accounts, hotel stays, or police interactions tied to the stolen license still carry your name and license number. Fixing those records takes work. You must contact each business directly and submit documentation. No central agency reverses everything at once. Each company sets its own rules and timeline.
The stakes can rise quickly. For example, if someone abandons a rental car or commits a crime using your stolen ID, law enforcement databases may record your name. At that point, the situation shifts from financial inconvenience to legal exposure.
HOW TO PROTECT A LOVED ONE’S IDENTITY AFTER DEATH
Police reports and formal disputes are often required before businesses will remove fraudulent records. (Kurt “Cyberguy” Knutsson)
How to prove physical ID theft was not yours
With credit card fraud, the issuer investigates the charge. With physical ID theft, businesses and agencies often require you to prove that you did not authorize the activity. That process usually starts at IdentityTheft.gov. The FTC generates an Identity Theft Report, which serves as an official statement of fraud. Most banks, collection agencies and rental companies will not proceed without it.
You may also need:
- A local police report
- A copy of your driver’s license
- A notarized identity affidavit
- Proof of residence tied to the date of the fraud
When thieves open fraudulent accounts in your name, dispute each one separately. Act quickly. Send a written response within 30 days of the first collection notice to protect your rights under federal law. Fraud that appears on your credit report requires another step. Contact Equifax, Experian and TransUnion individually and submit formal disputes with supporting documentation. The credit bureaus then have up to 30 days to complete their investigations. No central agency manages these corrections for you. Instead, every company sets its own documentation rules and timeline. Therefore, you must track deadlines, follow up consistently and keep detailed records of every communication.
You cannot simply replace your driver’s license number after identity theft
When a credit card number is stolen, the bank issues a new one. When a driver’s license is stolen, the number usually remains the same. In California, if your driver’s license is lost or stolen, you can request a replacement card through the DMV online system or at a field office. The official process gets you a new physical card. No new license number is automatically assigned when the card is stolen.
If there is identity misuse tied to the license number, the DMV fraud review process allows you to submit documentation, including police reports, to support an identity theft claim before they take further action. A Social Security number is even harder to change. The Social Security Administration approves new numbers only in cases involving continued harm. Applicants must provide extensive documentation and appear in person.
A stolen physical ID, such as your license, includes:
- Full legal name
- Date of birth
- Address
- Driver’s license number
- Signature
That information is sufficient for in-person identity checks, rental contracts, certain loan applications and travel-related transactions.
Credit monitoring alerts can help you detect identity misuse before it spreads across multiple accounts. (Kurt “CyberGuy” Knutsson)
Why ongoing identity protection matters
There is no single agency that tracks misuse of your driver’s license across rental companies, lenders, collection agencies and law enforcement systems. That burden falls on you.
Identity theft services monitor your identity across all three credit bureaus and alert you to new credit inquiries, account openings and changes to your credit file. If fraud appears, you are assigned a dedicated U.S.-based case manager who helps:
- File disputes with Equifax, Experian and TransUnion
- Prepare and submit FTC Identity Theft Reports
- Contact creditors and collection agencies
- Track documentation deadlines and responses
- Assist with reimbursement claims when eligible
Plans can include identity theft insurance of up to $1 million per adult to cover eligible expenses such as lost wages, legal fees and document replacement costs related to identity theft recovery.
No service can prevent every misuse of a stolen ID. But when the issue involves police reports, credit bureaus, tax agencies and collection accounts, having structured support can make all the difference.
The California woman in this case was not enrolled in an identity theft protection service. Some businesses may reverse fraudulent charges, but it is unclear whether she recovered the full $78,500.
See my tips and best picks on how to protect yourself from identity theft at Cyberguy.com
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Kurt’s key takeaways
Credit card fraud follows a defined path. You report the charge, the issuer investigates and your account number changes. In most cases, the disruption ends there. Physical ID theft moves differently. It spreads across rental companies, hotels, credit bureaus and sometimes law enforcement databases. Instead of one dispute, you may face several. Instead of replacing a number, you must protect a permanent identity marker tied to your name. That shift matters. A stolen driver’s license carries your legal identity into the real world. Therefore, recovery demands documentation, patience and persistence. Each business sets its own rules. Each agency runs its own timeline. You coordinate the process. The lesson is clear. Protecting your financial accounts is critical. However, protecting your physical identification may be even more important. Once someone uses it in person, the cleanup becomes personal, procedural and time-consuming. Layered monitoring, early alerts and fast reporting reduce long-term damage. The faster you respond, the more control you keep.
Have you ever dealt with physical ID theft, and did the recovery process take longer than you expected? Let us know your thoughts by writing to us at Cyberguy.com
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A long time ago, in 2004, the Federal Communications Commission laid down a rule designed to prevent a monopoly: No one company could broadcast to more than 39 percent of all the TV households in the United States. But then Donald Trump returned to the White House in 2025. Brendan Carr became FCC chairman and immediately kicked off a deregulatory initiative called “Delete, Delete, Delete,” in which Carr vowed to get rid of “every rule, regulation, or guidance document” that placed “unnecessary regulatory burdens” on companies. And within months, Nexstar, which already owned over 200 stations nationwide and had hit its ownership cap, announced that it had entered an agreement to purchase its rival, Tegna, for an estimated $6.2 billion — something that could only happen, however, if Carr agreed to change the FCC’s rules.
If you ask Nexstar why it’s pursuing a merger that would give it control of over 80 percent of the market, it’d point to Big Tech as the culprit. As advertisers take their money to Netflix, YouTube, and other digital streamers, linear television — the local television news, the broadcast affiliates, the basic cable networks — has suffered, forcing them to consolidate and shut down newsrooms. In that sense, Nexstar argued, the merger would help it compete for ad revenue with the streaming services, thereby building more robust local journalism. However, the merger’s opponents believe that this is a basic violation of antitrust laws and principles — not to mention the danger of letting one company have editorial control over the vast majority of America’s local television newsrooms.
But the second Trump administration handles regulatory hurdles a little differently than others, and companies have found that it’s faster to get what they want if they bypass the agencies and talk (read: suck up) to Trump directly. And when Nexstar did so publicly, it confirmed its opponents’ fears about political influence. Last September, in the fraught weeks after the fatal shooting of Charlie Kirk, Nexstar announced it would no longer broadcast Jimmy Kimmel Live! — a response to Carr’s claim that the FCC could revoke the broadcast licenses of TV stations that aired the comedian’s comments related to Kirk. It briefly led to ABC suspending Kimmel’s show, though ABC and Nexstar soon reversed their decision after a massive nationwide backlash and an ABC boycott.
However, Nexstar’s loyalty to Trump himself was not enough to win over his most powerful MAGA supporters. Newsmax, a cable news network with a deeply pro-Trump bent, and its CEO, longtime Trump donor and outside adviser Chris Ruddy, filed a lawsuit objecting to the merger, claiming that Nexstar’s anticompetitive behavior would force channels like his off the air with steeper carriage fees. He specifically accused Nexstar of jacking up the fees for stations to carry Newsmax, while offering its similar network, NewsNation, for much cheaper.
The Nexstar-Tegna MAGA makeover then took a more subtle turn. NewsNation hired the pro-Trump Fox News commentator Katie Pavlich and gave her her own primetime show. (The network had already hired a slew of former Fox journalists as well.) Around this time, a political group called Keep News Local began airing ads in DC that seemed to directly address Trump, praising him for having “defeated the fake news monopolies before through independent voices and local news” and claiming that the Nexstar-Tegna merger was “crucial for MAGA to survive.” (A little self-contradictory and mildly illogical, but it’s the kind of stuff that Trump likes to hear.) When I last spoke to Ruddy in February, I asked if he’d worried that the dark money going into Keep News Local would sway Trump, and he chose his words carefully: “I think at the end of the day, Trump makes up his own mind. I’m not sure he’s going to be influenced by an ad campaign.”
For months, no one could accurately predict if Trump would override Carr’s wishes and bless the deal, as he’s often done for other companies facing regulatory scrutiny. Trump’s Truth Social posts about the merger have been a good indicator of how precarious the merger has been and who’s been able to influence him at any given moment: Last November, he blasted the deal as an “EXPANSION OF THE FAKE NEWS NETWORKS,” but by February, he posted that the deal would “help knock out the Fake News because there will be more competition.”
Several current and former NewsNation employees told Status at the time that they feared that the parent company was steering NewsNation away from the centrist, “unbiased” reputation they’d long cultivated. “A lot of people within the network believe that the network has gone hard right to appeal to Trump and Brendan Carr,” one former employee told Status. Coincidentally, days before the deal was finalized, NewsNation began ramping up its explicitly pro-Trump content, tweeting a clip of CNN’s Kaitlan Collins being berated by White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, along with the comment “Just going to leave this here.”
When Trump greenlit the merger in mid-March, but before the FCC’s three commissioners could vote on whether to waive the ownership cap, Nexstar and Tegna immediately announced a new complication: Tegna and Nexstar had already started merging. Tegna was no more and CEO Mike Steib had already sold $22.6 million of his company stock.
In response, eight state attorneys general and satellite TV operator DirectTV, which had already been planning to file separate federal antitrust suits against the merger, asked US District Judge Troy Nunley in Sacramento for an emergency restraining order that would prevent Nexstar from taking over Tegna’s assets. The order was granted on March 27th and on April 17, Nunley issued a formal injunction, ruling that Tegna must be operated as an independent financial entity, and Nexstar must take steps to ensure it remains separate from Tegna before further legal proceedings.
For now, Nunley has allowed the states and DirecTV to combine their cases, in which both argue that the merger was a clear violation of antitrust laws and would crush news competition.
Meanwhile, Republicans and Democrats in Congress are furious at Carr. On March 30th, Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Maria Cantwell (D-WA) sent the chairman a joint letter admonishing him for allowing his staff to waive the regulations to let the merger pass, instead of having the full commission of political appointees — one from the Biden administration — vote on it. “Under these circumstances,” they wrote, “any subsequent vote risks being largely procedural rather than a genuine exercise of commission responsibility.” They also pointed out that their hasty approval without the commission’s approval would now complicate the merger financially: “In a transaction of this scale, where integration proceeds quickly and unwinding becomes impractical, delay in judicial review can insulate the decision from meaningful challenge.” Notably, though they share similar ideological views on the media and deregulation, Cruz and Carr have frequently clashed over how to achieve their objectives. Cruz previously slammed Carr as a “mafioso,” for instance, for the way he’d used the FCC to silence Kimmel.
But even if it’s legally paused, the journalistic merger’s fallout has started to hit local news. NPR’s David Folkenfirk reported on Tuesday that Tegna journalists had already started receiving orders to stop broadcasting content from major broadcasters like ABC, CBS, and NBC — media outlets being targeted by Carr — and instead begin airing content from Nexstar’s NewsNation.
- Brendan Carr’s views on using the FCC to punish major broadcasters was outlined pretty extensively in the chapter he authored in Project 2025, an initiative led by the conservative Heritage Foundation on how to reform the federal bureaucracy to be more favorable to the American right.
- Exactly how much is local television losing to digital? According to industry publication NewscastStudio, in an investor call defending the purchase, Nexstar chairman Perry Sook cited a market research study from Borrell Associates, which found that “digital advertising in local markets exceeds $100 billion, compared to just $25 billion for local linear television advertising, with nearly two-thirds of digital ad dollars flowing to five major technology companies.”
- If you want to see exactly how much Keep Local News was trying to suck up to Trump, the ads are archived here.
- The Vergecast has a long-running segment called “Brendan Carr is a dummy.”
- The LA Times reported on last week’s preliminary hearings in front of Nunley, and how lawyers for Nexstar, the states, and DirecTV plan to argue their case.
- The Desk has insights from Kirk Varner, a former TV newsroom director, on how the case could go.
- Andrew Liptak covered Nexstar’s previous acquisition sprees for The Verge in 2018.
- Adi Robertson walks through exactly how the Kimmel suspension was an attack on free speech.
- Brendan Carr keeps trying to convince people that he’s not threatening to suspend broadcast licenses for reporting on unfavorable things like the Iran war, reports Lauren Feiner.
- The Vergecast has a long-running segment called “Brendan Carr is a dummy.”
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A Chinese-built humanoid robot beat the human half-marathon world record in Beijing on Sunday, marking a breakthrough moment in a high-stakes global race for technological dominance.
A robot developed by Chinese smartphone maker Honor completed the 21-kilometer (13-mile) race in 50 minutes and 26 seconds, beating the human record of about 57 minutes set by Uganda’s Jacob Kiplimo last month.
The performance marked a dramatic improvement from last year’s inaugural event, when the top robot finished in more than 2 hours and 40 minutes.
Dozens of humanoid robots competed alongside about 12,000 human runners, navigating a parallel course to avoid collisions.
CHINA’S COMPACT HUMANOID ROBOT SHOWS OFF BALANCE AND FLIPS
A robot crosses the finish line in the Beijing E-Town Half Marathon and Humanoid Robot Half-Marathon held in the outskirts of Beijing on April 19, 2026. (Andy Wong/AP)
Nearly half of the robots ran using autonomous navigation, while others relied on remote control, organizers said.
Despite the breakthrough, the race still saw glitches, with some robots stumbling at the start or veering into barriers.
Engineers said the winning robot was designed to mimic elite athletes, featuring long legs of about 37 inches and advanced cooling systems to sustain performance.
US TARGETS CHINESE ROBOTS OVER SECURITY FEARS
“Looking ahead, some of these technologies might be transferred to other areas,” said Du Xiaodi, an engineer with the Honor team. “For example, structural reliability and liquid-cooling technology could be applied in future industrial scenarios.”
Team members celebrate next to the winning Honor Lightning humanoid robot during a medal ceremony after the second Beijing E-Town Half Marathon and Humanoid Robot Half Marathon in Beijing, China, on April 19, 2026. (Maxim Shemetov/Reuters)
Spectators reacted with a mix of amazement and unease at the machines’ rapid progress.
“It’s the first time robots have surpassed humans, and that’s something I never imagined,” Sun Zhigang, who attended the event with his son, told The Associated Press.
HUMANOID ROBOTS HIT MASS PRODUCTION IN CHINA
“The robots’ speed far exceeds that of humans,” spectator Wang Wen told the outlet. “This may signal the arrival of sort of a new era.”
A robot starts alongside human runners at the Beijing E-Town Half Marathon and Humanoid Half Marathon on the outskirts of Beijing on April 19, 2026. (Ng Han Guan/AP)
Experts say the race highlights China’s accelerating push to dominate robotics and artificial intelligence, even as widespread commercial use of humanoid robots remains limited, according to Reuters. The experts said Chinese robotics firms are still working to develop the AI software needed for humanoids to match the efficiency of human factory workers.
Runners take pictures of a humanoid robot during the second Beijing E-Town Half Marathon and Humanoid Robot Half Marathon in Beijing on April 19, 2026. (Haruna Furuhashi/Pool Photo via AP)
“The future will definitely be an AI era,” engineering student Chu Tianqi told Reuters. “If people don’t know how to use AI now … they will definitely become obsolete.”
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The competition underscores a broader technological race between China and the United States, as Beijing invests heavily in advanced robotics as part of its long-term economic strategy.
The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.
According to Nikkei Asia, even as suppliers ramp up DRAM production, manufacturers are only expected to meet 60 percent of demand by the end of 2027. SK Group chairman has even said that shortages could last until 2030.
The world’s largest memory makers — Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron — are all working to add new fabrication capacity, but almost none of it will be online until at least 2027, if not 2028. SK opened a fab in Cheongju in February, but that is the only increase in production among the three for 2026.
Nikkei says that production would need to increase by 12 percent a year in 2026 and 2027 to meet demand. But according to Counterpoint Research, an increase of only 7.5 percent is planned.
The new facilities will primarily focus on producing high-bandwidth memory (HBM), which is used in AI data centers. With the companies already prioritizing HBM over general-purpose DRAM used in computers and phones, it’s not clear how much these new fabs will help alleviate the price crunch facing consumer electronics. Everything from phones and laptops, to VR headsets and gaming handhelds have seen price increases due to the RAM shortage.
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