A few years ago, when I still lived in California, I had a woman who lived in the projects in New Orleans somehow get my name and SSN, and she started creating accounts in my name, telling people she was my wife.
She got into me for something over $40,000, the largest account balance being $24,500. That one account was to Bell South, for a cellphone account. $24,500 for a cellphone account???? Are they crazy? She had 4 numbers on the account, and had purchased a bunch of accessories, and had not paid the bill for 6 months. Now, I don't know about y'all, but if I get 30 days past due, Verizon will cut me off pretty soon. What the hades is wrong with Bell South's A/R procedures? How did they keep that account going for six months and let the balance get almost to $25K before shutting it down and trying to collect from me?
Anyway, long story short, I didn't have to pay for any of those accounts, and I (sort of) got them off my credit history by having my history flagged as a victime of ID theft (see below). I filed a police report with the Pasadena PD. They said they would forward it to the New Orleans PD. I called the New Orleans PD to follow up, and to let them know that I would gladly fly down there to testify against this woman. I mean, they had her name, her NO address, everything they needed to go over there and pick her up. You wanna know what I was told? I was told that it wasn't enough money to go arrest her. Apparently, the fraud has to exceed $150K or so before the PD thinks its a big enough deal to arrest someone for. So she got off scott free, and I had to live with the detritus of cleaning up my credit status after her depredations. I would have liked to see one of her hands cut off.
In any case, ever since then, I have had to jump through hoops to prove that I am who I say I am in order to legitimately open up an account in my own name because of the ID theft flags on my credit history. I hope her privates whither up and fall off.
So, the point is that, however the information originally got out there, you can't put the cat back in the bag. So if your CHL status got out at some point, legally or illegally, now it is out there, and it is in some database somewhere. So I guess if a PI knows what databases to query, he doesn't necessarily have to obtain the info from the state.