Arrest at the airport, on the way home to Dublin, was the first of a series of bizarre and alarming events in what was an obvious case of identity theft – or was it?
AS WE WALKED across the plaza at Schiphol airport, in Amsterdam, I held my head high and looked straight ahead, trying not to catch anyone’s eye. The policeman on my left was carrying my coat. The policeman on my right had already explained that he wasn’t going to handcuff me, although, strictly speaking, he was supposed to.
It was February 5th this year. I’d been stopped at the passport check at the airport, on my way back to Dublin from the Netherlands. My name had come up on the system, the border police told me, and I had to wait while they ran a check with the Amsterdam police. It would take just 15 minutes, they assured me.
When the phone rang after 10 minutes, the border guard turned to me. “You’re under arrest,” he said. “For internet fraud.”
Adrenalin rushed through my body. I told him he had made a mistake and he had no right to arrest me. But nothing I said made any difference.
Off with my belt, my shoes. Into a cell to be searched. I wasn’t allowed to use my phone. No one knew I was there.
For an hour I stared at the white tiled walls of a prison cell. Later, I was taken to an Amsterdam police station and, eventually, taken to see a detective.
“I’m looking at you, and I know you’re innocent,” he said, to my intense relief. He’d done a background check. My identity must have been stolen, he told me.
We chatted about the details of the case: €100,000 had been stolen from a bank account in the Netherlands, of which €16,000 had been transferred to an account at Postbank, opened in my name in 2005.
We wrote up a brief statement, and the detective told me the case would be dropped in a few weeks.
Next day I travelled home to Dublin, still shaken but determined to find out more about identity theft. My work involves trips to dangerous parts of the world, and I wanted to know whether my identity had been used elsewhere to commit a crime. I needed help to be able to assess the risk of being arrested again on my travels.
I’m not the first Irish person to believe they’ve had their identity stolen. Bogus Irish passports were used in the Israeli assassination of a Hamas official in Dubai and in a Russian spy ring in the US.
“Unfortunately, Irish passports have been forged for years; an Irish passport is priceless,” says John Kelly, a private investigator. “There is no hard-set pattern to identity theft. Schiphol airport is actually one of the hardest airports to get through. Someone could have been testing the resilience of your identity to see if they could pull off a major stroke.”
The internet fraud in my case dated back to 2005. That left plenty of time for criminals to get away with other crimes using my name.
The fraud squad advised me to get a letter from the Dutch authorities explaining what had happened, in case I was arrested in another country. But because I hadn’t been arrested in Ireland, they were limited in how far they could investigate.
The Irish passport office offered to use Interpol to find out if my identity had been used elsewhere to commit a crime. But then they changed their mind; they couldn’t request this information unless it was for a bigger crime, they said.
“ID theft is becoming a far bigger challenge for us,” admitted Joseph Nugent, head of the Irish Passport Office.
“We don’t even know how many people have had their identity stolen in Ireland . . . We’re taking a far closer look at the issue in the passport service today, and I certainly hope that we’ll be in a position to offer more formal guidelines by the end of the year.”
I managed to contact two Irish victims of passport theft, but neither wanted to speak about the experience for the radio documentary I had started to make about identity theft.
The Dutch embassy in Ireland helped to put me in touch with the Amsterdam police press office, which refused all interviews.
The number I had been given by the detective in Amsterdam didn’t work outside the Netherlands. When I managed to get him on the phone he told me that there were other suspects in the case, and was vague about when it would be dropped.
At the end of March I finally received a letter that the case was being dropped “for lack of evidence”. It would be reopened if new evidence came to light.
I had also contacted Postbank to find out how my identity had been used to open the fraudulent account. Had the perpetrator forged a copy of my passport, made a photocopy or just used my data?
Postbank’s response, in early May, couldn’t have surprised me more: my identity had never been used to open a bank account in 2005. The account had been opened in the name of one James Williams, who is of Nigerian origin and was born on the same day as me: March 3rd, 1968.
So he’s Nigerian, he’s a man, he’s called James Williams, and somehow the Dutch police mistook me, a white Irish woman called Louise Williams, for him?
I’m still waiting for answers from the Dutch police about why I was arrested and why I was led to believe I had been the victim of identity theft.
Louise Williams's documentary I Can Tell by Looking at Youis on RTÉ Radio 1 at 6pm tonight
