The identity theft service Nexus, which became active on the dark web this week, has put digital scans of more than 153 million driver’s licenses belonging to people in the United States and Canada up for sale. The service is also alleged to contain more than 10 million identity cards, more than three million travel documents or international IDs, and at least 579,000 health cards.
Some people interviewed by KrebsOnSecurity said the images may be leaking from a widely used identity verification company based in Louisiana. The FBI’s New Orleans office launched a formal investigation into the source of the images today.
Nexus was introduced on the Russian cybercrime forum Exploit on Monday, August 31. The service’s operator also put documents belonging to some senior government officials, including U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, up for sale. Searches on the service returned approximately 11.5 million pages of results, while Canadian driver’s licenses accounted for approximately 1.1 million records; 473,673 records from Ontario were listed.
In addition to driver’s licenses, the records include marijuana dispensary cards, labels such as “CDL,” which may refer to commercial driver’s licenses, and “CAC,” which may refer to government access cards. Nexus claims to have been collecting the data for more than a year and to have obtained it from an active breach targeting a major identity verification company. Driver’s license records increased by approximately 400,000 in 24 hours; some documents include infrared and ultraviolet images of both the front and back.
Why it matters
The scope of the database shows that the incident is not limited to leaked driver’s license information, but poses a broader identity verification risk involving different types of documents, such as identity cards, travel documents, and health cards. The presence of infrared and ultraviolet images, in addition to the front and back sides, suggests that the records may contain details used in document verification processes. The rapid increase in the number of records and the listing of documents belonging to some high-ranking public officials raise further questions about the scope of the service and how the data was obtained. The FBI investigation means that the source of the allegations and the possible connection to the Louisiana-based identity verification company will be officially examined; however, it has not yet been clarified whether all of the records are genuine and up to date.
Background
FBI is not a new name in the FikirPilot archive: in the last 90 days, we have published 2 reports in which this name appeared; the latest was dated August 26, 2026.
Term: identity verification
Identity verification is the process of proving that a user is the person they claim to be.