The old driving test fraud is a regular news item. I suppose, therefore, that another such story hitting the BBC News comes as no great surprise.
Tens of thousands of people are paying fraudsters to sit their driving test for them, the BBC has learned.
Tens of thousands? That level of fraud seems to me incredible. The DSA claims that they have been investigating and are planning arrests, but systematic fraud to that level so far undetected (in which case how do they know?) seems just a little like hyperbole to me. The radio bulletin talked of tens of thousands of unlicensed drivers out on the roads. If the DSA has the evidence, then presumably they are taking action against both the fraudsters who take the tests and the drivers who are paying for the scam. Neither has been expanded upon, so given that evidence is somewhat sparse, I’m a little sceptical about the numbers quoted.
Now, I’ve a nasty suspicious mind and on hearing about this on the radio this morning, I wondered how long it would take for the story to get linked to identity management. About halfway through the day as it turned out. By the end of the day, the same bulletin was talking of biometric verification of candidates, including fingerprints and iris scans.
So given that we have photo licences, how is the fraud working?
The scam works when the fraudsters pass themselves off as the person in the photo on the provisional licence that candidates must bring to their test.
Okay, so I realise that examiners are busy people, but here is the first little clue as to why any form of identity card is weak. If an examiner cannot tell – or is too rushed to have the time to check properly – that the person presenting the licence is not the same as the person in the photograph, then basic human instinct for a “wrong ’un” is already undermined. People have a natural tendency to trust official documentation – even those that you would expect to know better. But before you criticise the examiners, just remember how many of these things they are looking at on a daily basis. That is why identity cards don’t work.
The head of the DSA’s fraud team, Andy Rice, said: “It is quite common for them to do over 100, sometimes over 200 tests, before we’re in a position to arrest them. We’re into the tens of thousands.”
You would think that the DSA would pick up on this rather more quickly – given that the fraudsters can be incredibly stupid, such as this gentleman from a couple of years back:
Sorhaindo paid £5,995 to the Driving Standards Agency with his own credit card before his activities were finally uncovered by a suspicious driving examiner.
Sorhaindo was caught because an examiner became suspicious – not because the DSA’s system picked up the little matter of the same credit card being used to pay for multiple tests.
This is a government agency. By government agency standards, it is probably one of the better ones. Now, just ask yourself – before some bright spark suggests that ID cards would solve this problem – how well do you think an ID card would be at picking this up? Clue: We already have the evidence before us.
This will bring howls of outrage but I will say it anyway, I can recognise ‘native’ british people readily by hair colour, complexion and eye colour. ; confronted with a person of a different race them I’m afraid hair colour and eye colour are invariably black and brown leaving less by which I am able to differentiate. It is a fact that “they all look the same”…. Chinese say the same about Europeans.
the case I read about yesterday mentioned an Asian name.
The point about iris scans and fingerprints etc is that the ‘busy’ examiner who is not noticing the difference in people’s photos will have extra help in making a judgement. The scanned biometric will highlight a problem regardless of the examiner’s judgement. You have a personal objection to ID cards that allow you to skirt over the facts – of course ID cards will improve things. You can argue that are not worth the expense or that it is too ‘inconvenient’ to have them but when you pretend they are no use at all – that is when I realise your ideology is over-riding the facts.
So which part of “biometric technology is unreliable” did you not understand during the ID cards debate? For a small demographic, there may be a case, but for millions of people, the failure rate will be too high to be effective. The driving test process is already overloaded, so biometrics, while an alluring siren call for the hard of thinking, is a non-starter. You are left then, with a visual check of the card. Given that the photo driving licence is a defacto ID card for the purposes of the driving test we can see just how effective ID cards will be in practice. They haven’t stopped this type of fraud and no reasonable person would expect them to do so.