Identity Crimes
Here's a scenario. You wake up one day in the wee hours of the morning, and begin work on a project for a client, perhaps working on a website design or online presence campaign and you hear outside of the front door of your semi-detached home an altercation going on between people who are making quite a ruckus for you and your neighbours.
You continue working, trying to ignore the altercation, which although it has not escalated, it continues without calming or wavering. Their noise level remains the same as you try to work, until you've just about had it and decide to confront the situation yourself.
You go to your front door and open it up, and stand on the front porch and ask in a firm and bold voice for the two men to keep it down. They turn to you and begin trying to lure you into their conflict but you're not having any of it. Instead you address them once again in a firm voice and remind them that other people are still trying to sleep and have to get up for work at some point soon. They turn and upon realizing that the situation has now turned against them in terms of the Casus Belli, they turn and leave, each going their own direction.
From that point forward, your day continues and you're finding that throughout the course of your work day (you work from home like many Canadians currently do), there are more and more situations of a similar nature that seem to be drawing you further and further in. Noise here, a conflict there. More and more they interfere in your work day, but in the interest of keeping obstacles affecting your day to a minimum, you deal with them one at a time.
Perhaps the wise thing might have been in each of those cases to call the Police to have them come and sort things out, but by the time they arrived likely each of the situations would could have been solved, meaning you could get back to work instead of losing two or three hours waiting for the problem to be solved. Not that the Police are that slow and its not a criticism of their work, but in many cases it seems that you could probably solve these problems and get back to your work much more quickly than otherwise.
A few days go by, and you've turned in your project to the client and are awaiting the pay, but by the third day it hasn't come. You decide due to budget constraints and pressures to investigate, and after doing some calling and follow-up calls, you find out that someone else received your payment cheque. Your identity has been stolen, however, not by the usual means where some steals a credit card or identification and then uses it to commit financial fraud of some form, but rather the perpetrators are part of an ideological collective who decided that you were not behaving like yourself, a web designer, but behaving more like a Police Officer, or Security Guard, so they the membership of this ideological collective (whose reach you didn't know was so extensive) arranged to have your payment addressed and sent to someone else who was more consistent with being a web designer and brand promoter than you were. To them, you were being more consistent with being a Police Officer or Security Guard, but no payment from the city has been issued to you for that role, to compensate for the fact that said group had your payment sent to someone who did not work for it.
This is a form of identity theft that has been gaining traction for years, perhaps secretly so over the last couple of decades, and though it rarely involves financial transactions, it does involve payments through a secretive underground barter system that permeates many grey and black-markets throughout big cities. Where the theft of your effort can be used to purchase services and goods, most of which are illegal or at the very least, controlled by law. This is an identity scam that exploits your identity based upon the consistency of your behaviour with your day to day life. If you are not consistent with it, by the standards of a group that secretly permeates much of society to a small degree, the members of that group can act to take your efforts from you and award them to someone else more consistent with you and your being, so that they may use them in this black-market barter system and by narcotics and sex, while in most cases, the same high control group will then treat you as if you are someone completely different from your own identity.
Welcome to the new form of identity theft.
Are We Ourselves?
That depends how much it might benefit someone else to be you, and considering that we are living in a society that is more and more controlled by secretive collectives and predatory ideological groups, this question is very pertinent to the times, and the first answer I've given is probably the most valid answer.
You are yourself as long as its not beneficial to someone else to a high degree to benefit from being you, especially if a group feels that your behaviour is inconsistent with your day to day acumen and activity, and hence uses their collective power to take your identity and to give it to someone else who can use the value of your output to buy goods and services on a barter system based black-market.
If you think that this sounds like the plot to one of my books or stories, perhaps one from The Butterfly Dragon or Grand Tapestry of Moments, you're dead wrong. This is an activity that is going on regularly every day in the streets of this city, where someone else can wear your identity, while yours is secretly replaced with that of someone else, and often without your knowing. You'll only become aware when you notice that people are treating you differently, and things come into your life that are geared towards the tastes of someone else.
As a web developer, you even notice that the advertising that is based upon the analytics associated with your identity and online activity is very different from what it usually is, as if an admin somewhere, has taken your unique analytics ID and swapped it with that of someone else. Now, your analytics data is driving the advertising and suggestions feed on their computers and devices with regard to online activity, while you're receiving suggestions and advertising that is geared to someone else's life that is completely different from yours.
You suddenly start noticing that you're receiving advertising related to clearing your criminal record (thinking, when did I acquire a criminal record?) and a slew of other online analytics related content that is very obviously geared towards someone else.
Fortunately, you have a friend in the business of analytics and you get fire him an email, explaining the situation and ask him if such a thing were possible. If one or more admins could get together as a joke, and swap the analytics IDs of two people?
She responds:
Yes, in principle a small group of privileged insiders could deliberately swap two people’s IDs in an internal system, but in practice it would be risky, highly traceable, and a clear violation of law and company policy.
What makes it technically possible
Admins with high privileges can usually edit or override key fields in identity graphs or credit files (including internal customer IDs) as part of legitimate maintenance, corrections, and dispute handling.
We know from “mixed file” credit-report cases that data for two people can be merged or mis-attributed due to errors in matching logic, bad inputs, or manual mistakes; the same technical mechanisms could be abused intentionally.
Insider-threat research treats “unauthorized data modification” as a common abuse pattern when staff have broad, under-monitored access.
What pushes against it (controls and incentives)
- Major bureaus and data brokers are subject to laws like the FCRA in the U.S. and analogous regimes elsewhere, which require “reasonable procedures” for accuracy; intentional tampering would be textbook non-compliance and create direct liability.
- Internal change controls, audit logs, and role-based access are standard mitigations; when errors like mixed files occur, they can often be traced back to specific processes or systems, which is why there are lawsuits and enforcement actions.
- From an incentive standpoint, swapping two people’s identities even “as a joke” creates enormous downside (regulatory fines, lawsuits, potential criminal exposure, job loss) and zero upside for the employees, making it an archetypal insider-threat scenario organizations design controls to prevent.
How this shows up in the real world
- The documented real-world version is not “joke swaps” but accidental “mixed credit files,” where one person’s data ends up attached to another’s profile due to name/SSN/address similarity or matching-algorithm quirks.
- These mix-ups are frequent enough that law firms and regulators have standing guidance on spotting and disputing them, which implies the underlying data models are mutable and that mistakes (and therefore hypothetically malicious changes) are technically feasible.
So: technically feasible, especially for a coordinated group of admins with sufficient rights; practically, it would be an obvious, logged, and legally radioactive insider attack, not something they could safely do as a joke, but it would certainly be possible and even trivially so. Would I do it? No, but I'm not every admin. When the victims are individuals, in the scheme of things, there's little they can do. The admins might claim it to have been a mistake or a mix-up, in which case its swept under the carpet in just the same way that saying "oops" after you drop that hundred dollar vase, suddenly makes it an accident.
You thank her for her insight and go about trying to get your money back.
So now that you understand the context of the title of this post, what's the answer?
Are we ourselves when we behave most consistently and most conformingly and least creatively, or are we ourselves according to our physical biomarkers, and when we're being most creative and adventurous and taking chances by doing things that slightly overstep our boundaries and improve the world in some small way?
Scenarios like these are becoming more and more commonplace as time goes on, and their negative effects can wear on individuals and a society as things of this nature occur more and more often, and those effects can lead to other potentially dangerous situations that arise as the pressure in the boiler pot increases.
The scenario that I just outlined are very close to scenarios I've experienced personally, and those I've been tracking and investigating online as a personal challenge to try to help leave this world a little bit better than it was when I got here.
I can tell you from personal experience, as being someone whose work and sense of accomplishment depends upon both my online work, and my identity, and that when people, especially predatory ideological collectives infringe upon those aspects of my life, it really does bring out that willfully forceful and determined presence that would take down whatever obstacle there was in order to deal with such a problem, and sometimes that side of me can be very protective and hypervigilant, though never abusive but certainly not the way I want to live my life all of the time.
This article isn't just for me though, because I know that these same things are happening to many other people and if someone doesn't speak up, that pressure will build and someone or a lot of somebodies might get hurt.
Sometimes people want to express it, but they don't understand what's going on under the hood of this wonderful and marvelous technology that has helped us to shape medicine and progress in ways that have benefited humanity beyond measure. However, any technology can also be misused, and in speaking up about this, I hope to alleviate the pressure and give credibility to those who've also experienced this.
Keep in mind though that a good portion of what I've expressed here deals with not the technology or its misuse, and remind you that technology is a tool. There also the fact that there is an ideological underground that is organized enough to quickly conduct such activity on a whim, while maintaining the means to swap people's identities (via social engineering and technology) and then use their effort as payments in a black-market barter system for narcotics and sex trafficking. These are pretty serious issues, and most women who are part of that trafficking network are not there because they want to be. They're there because they have no choice, and I'd never tell a woman what she can and can't do with her own body.
One thing that will certainly confirm what I'm speaking about is the fact that this very article will undoubtedly be given to the credit of someone with whom my own identity has been unknowingly swapped, and if this were a chess game, the people doing so will essentially be putting themselves into checkmate. They're proving my entire article and the argument I've presented here, but hey, I'm a horrible chess player, but someone who is concerned that there are other people out there who might really be affected in a bad way by these activities.
So I'm doing something about it.
Brian Joseph Johns
Credits and Citations:
The lady friend of mine who works as an admin for an analytics firm was played by
Perplexity AI, who actually did the research and confirmed the scenarios I outlined.
Citations:
Here are the cited sources with full URLs:
- (insider threat literature, privileged abuse in data-heavy orgs)
Systematic literature review: Insider Threat (TechRxiv): https://www.techrxiv.org/users/914512/articles/1287598-systematic-literature-review-insider-threat
- Related arXiv insider-threat review:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2407.05943.pdf
- (mixed credit report, FCRA, how files get mixed)
“Are Mixed Files Hurting Your Credit? Learn How the FCRA Can Help You Fix It”: https://tariqlaw.com/post/are-mixed-files-hurting-your-credit-learn-how-the-fcra-can-help-you-fix-it
- (mixed credit reports, error mechanisms, fixes)
“Mixed Credit Report Showing Wrong Data? Fix It in 5 Steps!”: https://consumerjustice.com/blog/mixed-credit-report-fix-it-in-five/
- (data brokers and privacy guidance)
“Taking Control of Your Data: A Quick Guide to Protecting Yourself from Data Brokers”: https://privacymatters.ubc.ca/news/taking-control-your-data-quick-guide-protecting-yourself-data-brokers
- (how and why credit files get mixed, legal context)
“A Stranger's Information is Mixed in Your Experian, Equifax or TransUnion Credit Report. Here Is What to Do!”: https://www.wsjustice.com/a-strangers-information-is-mixed-in-your-credit-report-here-is-what-to-do/
- (ProPublica on credit bureau mistakes and dispute handling)
“Credit Bureaus Are Leaving More Mistakes on Frustrated Consumers’ Reports”: https://www.propublica.org/article/credit-report-mistakes-cfpb-experian-transunion
- (mixed credit file mistakes, impact, and remedies)
“Mixed Credit File Mistakes: Their Impact & What You Can Do”: https://www.kellyguzzo.com/practices/mixed-credit-reports/
- (Equifax help on mixed credit files)
“What To Do if My Credit File is Mixed With Someone Else's?”: https://www.equifax.com/personal/help/article-list/-/h/a/mixed-credit-file/
- (insider threats in banking sector)
“Insider Threats in Banking Sector: Detection, Prevention, and ...”: https://jcsra.thestap.com/archives/volume-2025-4/6870c93824fbb712166871e9
- (another legal explainer on someone else’s info on your report)
“Someone else's information is on my Equifax credit report!”: https://clalegal.com/mixed-credit-files-when-someone-elses-information-gets-on-your-credit-report/
- (systematic literature review: insider threat – alternate copy of 17)
TechRxiv record (same work as 17, different entry): https://www.techrxiv.org/users/914512/articles/1287598-systematic-literature-review-insider-threat
- (news summary of error-fix difficulties, derived from ProPublica)
“It's Getting Harder to Fix Errors on Credit Scores”: https://www.newser.com/story/385125/its-getting-harder-to-fix-errors-on-credit-scores.html
Tools: Daz3D, Corel Painter, Adobe Photoshop, Lightwave 3D, Blender, Stable Diffusion (Easy Diffusion distribution), InstantID, Sadtalker, Google Colaboratory, Microsoft Copilot (Windows 11), Hitfilm, PhotoPea (a great web based Photoshop stand-in if you're on a low budget or in a pinch), Borderline Obsession...
DeepSeek AI for suggestions on exercises to improve aspects of describing scene and settings with a more sensory focused grammar.
InstantID by: Wang, Qixun and Bai, Xu and Wang, Haofan and Qin, Zekui and Chen, Anthony. Research Paper Title: InstantID - Zero-shot Identity-Preserving Generation in Seconds.
Sadtalker by: Zhang, Wenxuan and Cun, Xiaodong and Wang, Xuan and Zhang, Yong and Shen, Xi and Guo, Yu and Shan, Ying and Wang, Fei.
Research Paper Title: SadTalker: Learning Realistic 3D Motion Coefficients for Stylized Audio-Driven Single Image Talking Face Animation.
Gratitude: Our Mentors, Senseis, Sifus, Sebomnims, lifetime inspirations, family, friends, the Nomads (ask Stanton about that one), the Music, the Movies, the Theatre, the Arts, ASMR, (both YouTube and Bilibili and the many other creators on those platforms), the Gaming and Developer communities and of course, the audience.
Martial Arts (in the words of real experts and at least one comedian): https://brucelee.com (home of the real Dragon and an entire family of inspirations), http://iwco.online International Wing Chun Organization (International presence of a very scalable intensity martial art, protected and developed by Shaolin Nun Ng Mui) and the alma mater of Jinn Hua's own specialized variation thereof, https://iogkf.com International Okinawan Goju-Ryu Karatedo Federation (even Hanshi had his teachers), https://itftkd.sport International Taekwondo Federation (Here there be Taegers), https://tangsoodoworld.com Tang Soo Do World (the path of Grandmaster Chuck Norris), https://www.aikido-international.org International Aikido Federation (how else would Navy Chef Steven Seagal liberate a Nimitz Class Aircraft Carrier from a team of hijackers?), https://www.stqitoronto.com Shaolin Temple Quanfa Institute (The City Of Toronto's own Shaolin Temple), https://www.enterthedojoshow.com Master Ken's Ameri-Te-Do presence (If we can't laugh at ourselves, then we can at least laugh the loudest at others, and other Zen)
Magic (performance, illusion and perhaps the real thing): Magic Week Archive (I'm currently growing this section so stay tuned)
Jesse Enkamp: Karate Nerd
Jesse, a reknowned Sensei who runs his own dojo, explores the world of Martial Arts, traveling to many exotic locations to meet practitioners of a variety of different arts
Sensei Rokas: Martial Arts Journey
A reknowned Sensei of Aikido who in seeking to understand the roots of Aikido and its applications, seeks to stress test its effectiveness in a number of real world situations while studying its history
Seamus O'Dowd
An extensive growing archive Katas, Techniques and Waza (mostly Shotokan)
Extensive courses for calisthenics and body strength, stamina and flexibility
Special thanks to
Canva for inspiring other creators and giving them the tools
Special thanks to Captain Crunch and his wonderful sister!
Special thanks to Bandcamp for giving indie music artists a home under one roof
Something to give you perspective: The very first teacher had no formal education, didn't graduate and was self taught, but only because they had no other choice. We do.
Soon, when people arrive in Canada for the first time, we'll be able to say: Welcome to Europe :-)
I am Brian Joseph Johns and this is Shhhh! Digital Media at https://www.shhhhdigital.com or https://www.shhhhdigital.ca in Toronto, Ontario, Canada at 200 Sherbourne Street Suite 701.
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