INDIANAPOLIS A new facial recognition system at the Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles led to the arrest of a convicted forger as he tried to establish a sixth fake identity just months after his parole, the agency's head said Tuesday.
Commissioner Andy Miller told a symposium on identity theft and fraud that the facial recognition system installed at the BMV detected David Grice had obtained Indiana driver's licenses under six names and addresses. He had been paroled on fraud charges in Illinois in December.
He was using his new Indiana credentials to open separate bank accounts under the various names, BMV said in a report issued Tuesday. A "wanted" poster with his six BMV photos and various names had been distributed to every license branch in the state.
Within 48 hours, Grice walked into a license branch in the central Indiana city of Crawfordsville, where a BMV employee spotted him and alerted security.
"The only way we caught this guy was through the facial recognition system," Miller told a gathering of law enforcement officers on the state government campus.
The facial recognition system has spotted 463 discrepancies in photos so far in 2009, he said.
Grice was booked Tuesday into the Montgomery County Jail in Crawfordsville, where jail officials said there was no record of whether he had an attorney. Deputy BMV Commissioner Monty Combs said Grice was being held on seven felony counts including fraud.
Grice has 13 Illinois convictions dating to 1981 for forgery, theft, writing bad checks and a prison weapons charge. The Associated Press was unable to locate an attorney for him.
The facial recognition software requires that people seeking licenses or ID cards remove eyeglasses and not smile widely as the BMV takes their photographs.