HOUSTON — A man suspected of scamming thousands of Texans in a driver's license scheme has been arrested, according to police.
Tony Cao Li, 35, was recently extradited from New York and is currently being held in Travis County Jail on a $250,000 bond.
Officials said Li is part of an organized crime ring that gathered personal data on the dark web and then applied for replacement licenses. The group then used those IDs to open credit cards and steal large sums of money from victims.
DPS said at least 5,000 Texans were victimized in the scheme. According to the Dallas Morning News, the licenses were shipped to New York, Oklahoma and Georgia where they were sold to other people.
It wasn’t until Rep. Mary Gonzalez started asking questions that we started getting answers.
“I knew that it wasn’t public and so I decided to ask questions so that people could really wonder and have the information about what’s happening," Gonzalez said.
In a Texas House committee hearing in February, DPS Director Steven McGraw testified that the State of Texas mailed out 3,000 driver’s licenses to an organized crime ring out of China.
He said the group was selling the licenses to people already illegally in the U.S.
We spoke to one of the victims, who said he was first notified by his bank in November.
“It’s very frustrating because you don’t know what’s going to happen next. Even last week, the person was still accessing my account and trying to open an account with Verizon using my name,” he said.
He said thousands of dollars were stolen from his accounts and he’s still in the process of cleaning it all up.
“I feel like we have been specifically targeted. I just wonder how someone can have so much information on 3,000 people. They know everything about me,” he said.
McGraw said the crime ring used personal information from the dark web to answer security questions on Texas.Gov. The agency then started notifying victims by letter.
McGraw told lawmakers the security loophole has been closed, but the victim KHOU 11 News talked to still has concerns. He thinks they need to do more to verify your identity before allowing people to order replacement licenses, especially when shipping them out of state.