WEST CHESTER, Penna. – Li Ming, a graduate assistant in computer science at West Chester University, was arrested and charged with identity theft yesterday after trying to obtain a driver’s license under false pretenses.
“It’s the damnedest thing I ever heard of,” said West Chester chief of police, Brad Furlong.
“Mr. Li visited the department of motor vehicles and applied for a license, using a social security card and a birth certificate as forms of identification. When the clerk processed the documents, she discovered that Mr. Lee already had a valid driver’s license—and that he had passed away nine months ago.
When she asked him if he had just been reincarnated or what, he told her he was, indeed, Li Ming. That’s when the clerk called for a security guard.
According to Mr. Li, he had faced huge overdue balances on both his Visa and MasterCard, so he devised a scheme to eliminate his debt by faking his death, getting a new driver’s license, and applying for new credit cards eventually.
Li then paid a friend, who worked at the Daily Local News in West Chester, to slip an obituary of Li into the classified section of the newspaper. A few months later he applied for a duplicate birth certificate in his own name. Later he used that birth certificate to obtain a social security card, but his scheme blew a tire when he visited the department of motor vehicles.
Apparently Mr. Li thought that because his name is among the most common in China, where 50 percent of all families have one of nine surnames, it was safe to apply for a new identity using his old name.
“That certainly made his ‘new’ name easy to remember,” said Chief Furlong. “I guess you could say that his was a case of mistaken identity theft.”
Mr. Li, who was released on his own recognizance, had been reprimanded by university officials last year when he was caught downloading and uploading mp3 files to himself, despite a university-wide prohibition against file sharing.
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