What Can Criminals Do With a Stolen Driver's License - and What You Can Do About It
Bitdefender, Friday, May 30th, 2025
Your driver's license is a prized piece of plastic you keep in your wallet that lets you drive your car and produce identification for many uses. It's also a goldmine for identity thieves. Whether physically stolen, copied from a photo, or exposed in a data breach, the information on your driver's license can be misused in many ways.
Criminals, including identity thieves, can get their hands on your driver's license or driver's license information by physically stealing it or snapping a picture of it when you're not paying attention. This sometimes happens, for example, at a bar, airport, or on public transportation.
However, one of the easiest and quickest ways for criminals to gain access to thousands of driver's licenses in one go is through data breaches. According to the Identity Theft Resource Center, over 150 million US driver records have been exposed in data breaches since 2017. That means millions of driver's license numbers, names, and birth dates have been made available to cybercriminals.