It all began 36 years ago in the sun-drenched streets of Albuquerque, where William Woods was working at a hot dog stand, serving office workers and city dwellers. On an otherwise unremarkable day, his coworker—a large man with dark hair named Matthew Keirans—stole Woods’s wallet. With it, Keirans pilfered not just Woods’s Social Security number but eventually his entire identity. The theft was the seed of an existential usurpation and the beginning of a Kafkaesque nightmare for William Woods.
It used to be that someone would misuse your credit card or open a fake loan. In the Woods case, his entire life was taken over. That gets easier when AI can generate a huge amount of realistic false documents,” Lou Steinberg, the founder and managing partner of CTM Insights, a cybersecurity research lab, told me, noting that this will only become more prevalent with deepfake technology. “In the Woods case, the fraudster could fool people who didn't know the real victim.