How Did Blake Hall Get Between You And Your Identity?

During the pandemic his online-authentication company, ID.me, became the government’s digital gatekeeper. And its grip is only getting tighter

- Shawn Donnan and Dina Bass

If you were writing a techno-thriller, you’d give your hero a backstory like Blake Hall’s. He’s a Harvard MBA, an alumnus of McKinsey & Co.’s ultra-competitive summer associate program, and comes from a family with a proud military tradition. He’s a decorated Army Ranger who saw action in Iraq; his dad was an Army brigade commander; his grandfather fought off a Nazi assault in World War II. Now he’s the co-founder of a cybersecurity company who peppers his conversations with battlefield jargon, offering his meaculpas with pledges to do pushups as self-inflicted punishment. “I feel a moral duty because I still have the DNA of a soldier,” Hall said in an October interview.

So this past June, when he very publicly claimed that his company, ID.me, a player in the booming online identity verification business, had uncovered one of the biggest heists in U.S. history—a $400 billion theft of pandemic unemployment payments perpetuated by cyber criminal gangs—it came with a certain veneer of credibility.

Within minutes of Axios publishing the interview with Hall, the $400 billion figure went viral. It generated news stories of a nefarious dark web inhabited by Nigerian criminal syndicates out to massively defraud the U.S. government. It was seized on by think tanks on both the left and right that are trying to reimagine the delivery of government benefits. It caused a nervous shifting in seats among officials at the U.S. Department of Labor and state agencies overwhelmed by an unprecedented volume of unemployment claims. Republicans latched onto it as an example of obscene government waste.