This story was produced by our colleagues at the BBC.

Matt Vestge runs a graphic design and digital marketing firm; he also posts motivational videos on TikTok. At the end of 2020, Matt received a series of texts from an unknown number.

“They really were out of the blue,” Vestge said. “I didn’t believe much of anything he was saying until I received the pictures of my document.”

Vestge was shocked to find a text message containing photos of his personal ID documents. First, the fraudster demanded money. Then, when Vestge refused, he asked Vestge to join him on another scam.

Vestge turned down the offer and thought nothing more about it until last month, when he received an unwelcome letter from the Oregon Department of Revenue “stating that I had earned just over $6,000 worth of unemployment insurance, which I never did.”

Now, Vestge is struggling to prove it wasn’t him who claimed the benefits for which a tax bill must be paid.

“It can be really traumatic,” said Gavin Burton, who spent more than 25 years in London’s Metropolitan Police. Since then, he’s worked as a consultant and co-founded UFIKA, the U.K. Identity Fraud Advisory which supports victims and helps businesses deal with fraud.

“When I was in a place and we would go to counterfeiting factories,” he said, “these would traditionally be organized crime groups that were working in a kind of a two-bedroom maisonette above a kebab shop and they would be churning out false documents literally 24/7.”

During the COVID pandemic, there was a huge shift in the way companies began verifying our identities. Much of it moved online, and that played into the hands of fraudsters.

“There are websites out there on the internet, where you can just type in your name and what type of document you want, and for a very small amount of money, it can generate basically an AI-generated document with all of that data,” said Burton.

The improvements in generative AI mean it’s easy for criminals to commit fraud at scale. So who’s fighting against this growing army?

Richard Tomsett is with online verification company Onfido and is an expert in biometric fraud. “It’s very sophisticated and the tools are now very easy to come by and increasingly easy to use,” he said.

Fraud expert Gavin Burton said there’s an arms race going on between companies like Onfido and the fraudsters they’re trying to stop.

There are precautions we can take, however: “Try not to share pictures of you, your car and your registration number, or the house number of your property — yeah, those kinds of practical things,” he said.

And if we do find our identity stolen?

“The one thing that you have to do is act quickly and not stick your head in the sand and think it’s gonna go away. Don’t ignore debt collectors letters and things like that,” Burton said. “If you think, ‘Well this is not for me. I’ve not applied for that mobile phone,’ you do actually have to take quick, proactive action to try and resolve it.”