A fake driver's licence, a rented alias, and a mail drop for stolen credit
Corey Cato, 41, of Atlanta, was sentenced in September 2022 to more than seven years in federal prison for his role in a nationwide fraud ring that used stolen Social Security numbers — including numbers belonging to children — to build synthetic identities, open bank and credit card accounts, and steal nearly $2 million. Cato maintained a commercial mail-receiving address to intercept account correspondence and used a fake driver's licence and rental alias to insulate himself from detection.
- Year
- 2022
- Where
- United States
- Outcome
- Sentenced
- Reported loss
- $1.9 million
- Victims
- Not stated in the sources
- Schemes
- Synthetic identity fraud
- Last reviewed
- 2026-09-13
The facts, as recorded
- Homeland Security Investigations led the probe, part of a broader series of cases that produced criminal convictions for 12 defendants, including Turhan Lemont Armstrong of Northridge, California, convicted at trial in 2019 on 51 counts of fraud, money laundering and identity theft.
- Cato and his co-conspirators created synthetic identities by combining fake names and dates of birth with the Social Security numbers of real people, then used the synthetic identities and fake ID documents to open bank and credit card accounts.
- Cato maintained a commercial mail-receiving agency space called 'Pak Mail' in Georgia specifically to receive bank and credit card statements tied to the synthetic identities, insulating his own address from detection.
- Using a stolen Social Security number and a fake California driver's licence, Cato rented an apartment in Atlanta under the alias 'Jason Brown,' where, in February 2019, investigators found credit cards and financial documents in the names of synthetic identities including 'Adam M. Lopez' and 'Carlos Rivera.'
- Cato pleaded guilty on 9 May 2022 to one count of conspiracy to commit financial institution fraud and one count of aggravated identity theft.
- US District Judge R. Gary Klausner sentenced Cato on 1 September 2022 to more than seven years in federal prison and ordered $1,908,481 in restitution.
- In their sentencing memorandum, prosecutors wrote: "[Cato] and his co-conspirators built their wealth off the backs of the people whose identities they stole, many of them children. Both the effects on these victims' credit histories and their sense of violation are impossible to quantify, but they provide further reminder of the seriousness of [Cato's] crime and the callousness of his conduct."
Why this case matters
This is the largest-loss case documented on this page, and the mail-drop-and-alias infrastructure Cato built is a clean illustration of a mechanism repeated across nearly every synthetic identity case: the fraud only works if account statements, cards and PINs can be intercepted somewhere the real institution never suspects.
Building a paper trail to hide behind
Renting an apartment under a fabricated name, backed by a genuinely fake driver’s licence, gave Cato a second layer of insulation beyond the synthetic identities themselves — if investigators traced fraud to “Jason Brown,” that name led to an apartment lease, not to Cato. The commercial mail-receiving address served the same purpose for the underlying synthetic identities’ bank and credit statements.
Named as a reminder that children are targeted deliberately
Prosecutors’ own sentencing memorandum specifically noted that many of the stolen Social Security numbers belonged to children — echoing the GAO’s 2017 finding that a child’s SSN is prized specifically because nobody checks it for the better part of two decades.
The caveat
Cato pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit financial institution fraud and one count of aggravated identity theft; the case’s other participants, including Turhan Lemont Armstrong, were convicted separately and are not the subject of the facts above. The $1,908,481 restitution figure and sentence are those imposed on Cato specifically, following his own guilty plea and sentencing.
People named in the public record
- Corey Cato — convicted
Sources
- HSI investigates synthetic identities scheme that defrauded banks nearly $2M. US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Homeland Security Investigations. Accessed 2026-09-13. Supports: All key facts: the HSI investigation and its 12-defendant scope, the Armstrong reference, the synthetic identity creation method, the Pak Mail address, the fake driver's licence and rental alias, the named synthetic identities found, the guilty plea counts, the sentence and restitution, and the prosecutors' sentencing memorandum quote.