Getting a ticket when you don’t even have a license is frustrating enough. Imagine receiving dozens of them, all in your name, despite never having owned a car—that’s the nightmare that befell a 21-year-old in Bilbao, in Spain’s Basque Country, at the start of 2026.
As he kept opening the envelopes, he discovered he was officially linked to unknown vehicles, tied to traffic violations, thefts, unpaid charges at gas stations, and even road crashes. This accumulation of notices ultimately uncovered a suspected large‑scale identity theft. It was in Bilbao, in the heart of the Bizkaia province, that the case broke and prompted the Basque autonomous police, the Ertzaintza, to launch an inquiry to understand how his name had ended up on so many files.
In Bilbao, roughly a hundred fines for a young man with neither license nor car
It all began when this young man, who owns neither a driver’s license nor a vehicle, started receiving traffic fines at his home. The initial notices surprised him, but the repetition of letters and the nature of the offenses listed—from simple highway tickets to actual traffic accidents—convinced him that his identity was being used without his consent. Facing this situation, he went to a police station and filed a report, the starting point of the Ertzaintza’s investigation.
Subsequent investigations showed that several vehicles had been registered in his name, either temporarily or permanently, even though he had never held a license. The investigators estimate that at least a dozen cars are linked to him: in some records he appears as the owner, in others as the driver at the time of an offense or an accident. According to the initial findings, a man who dealt in vehicle purchases had used the young man’s personal data to register cars under his name, and those vehicles would have been used to commit around a hundred offenses and other crimes.
A pattern of identity theft that raises questions about the registration system
The investigation has already led to the arrest of a 26-year-old man, described as the central figure in this scheme, and the filing of charges against six other people. The latter are five men and one woman, aged 20 to 60, all suspected of involvement with the vehicles used for thefts, unpaid charges at gas stations, and road accidents. Police also uncovered allegedly forged documents that are believed to have passed through two agencies responsible for processing ownership changes, a key element in understanding how these cars ended up registered in the victim’s name.
This case illustrates how a stolen identity can become a real administrative and legal burden for someone who has never driven. In Spain, the road administration first sends notifications to the person listed as the vehicle owner in the official registry, and may ask them to identify the driver when the offense warrants it; if the original data are fraudulent, a person entirely unrelated can fall victim to the machinery of sanctions. In the Bilbao case, the Ertzaintza investigators are now focused on determining the precise role of each suspect, retracing the path of every car registered in the young man’s name, and assessing all the consequences of this identity theft on his situation.
