Instadollar Involved In Identity Theft

Instadollar is a financial services company that enabled U.S. citizens to remit funds to offshore online gambling operators. It has now come to light that Instadollar was using stolen identities in this process of transfer of funds. Instadollar is a part of Money Exchange International, which is owned by the well known Coye family in Belize. 

The American online gamblers were instructed to send their remittances to Belize through Instadollar. However this required them to send the funds to individuals in Belize so as to avoid the laws in the United States that hold remittances to online gambling operators as illegal. Therefore thousands of identities were stolen from the Belize City driver’s license database from October of 2007 to December of 2008. A clerk working for the Money Exchange International would then fill in the particulars of the stolen identities, such as addresses and driving license numbers, and forward the remittances to online gaming operators under a false signature. Money Exchange International earned a commission of almost USD 4 million on transactions of over USD 17 million in a one and a half year period. On occasions the daily remittances exceeded USD 100,000.

How the driver’s license databank was compromised is not yet known. Nor is it known as to who stole the identities. This came to light when the Belize police raided the Coye family home and found 1.5 million dollars in cash. 7News Belize reports that even the identities of the Prime Minister and the Governor of the Central Bank were used in this operation.