(The Epoch Times)—The FBI said Wednesday it is investigating a site on the dark web after reports it was selling more than 150 million U.S. and Canadian driver’s licenses. Among them was the license information of the assistant director of the FBI.
“The FBI can confirm that it is looking into the incident,” a spokesperson for the FBI told The Epoch Times in an emailed statement. “Due to the ongoing nature of the investigation, we decline to comment further.”
There is no stated timeline for the investigation, the agency said.
Independent journalist Brian Krebs was the first to detect the criminal site, which was advertised on a Russian cybercrime forum with his own Virginia driver’s license appearing as a free sample on the site.
That detail caught his attention and led him to examine the rest of the site.
He published a report on Sept. 1 detailing that the site was offering digital scans of millions of the licenses. He said that nine people impacted by the data breach confirmed with him that the scans were real.
“The record that features my driver’s license includes six image files—three pairs of photos of the license’s front and back, a basic image scan, as well as infrared and ultraviolet versions of the same images,” the journalist wrote in his report detailing the breach. “A date and timestamp is appended to each image file, and the timestamp on my license scan corresponds to a date in June 2025 when I took a flight to the midwest United States to attend a family funeral.”
The site, called Nexus, went offline after Krebs’s report. While it was active, the site claimed to have driver’s licenses of individuals from both the United States and Canada. While Canadian records represented a part of the total, the majority appeared to involve American licenses.
Nexus also claimed that the license scans originated from an ongoing breach at “a major identity verification company” whose clients include several Fortune 500 companies.
If the scale of the information heist is verified, the breach would represent one of the largest ever involving government-issued identity documents in North America, putting large numbers of people at risk for identity theft and fraud. Driver’s licenses function as primary identification with banks, employers, rental agencies, and government offices.
People whose licenses may be among those listed should monitor their credit reports, bank accounts, and other accounts that rely on license data.
