Someone in Israel used my Israeli ID number to open accounts and take credit. What can I do from abroad?

Israeli citizens who left decades ago are unusually exposed to this, and the reason is structural. The identity number stays valid forever, the address on the Population Registry is stale, so the letters go somewhere else, and nobody notices until a refusal, a demand letter or an enforcement file surfaces years later. By then the impostor has usually built a record rather than committed a single act, and the work is undoing a history rather than reporting a theft.

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Detailed Answer

Start with what cannot be fixed. The mispar zehut is permanent. The Population and Immigration Authority will replace a lost or stolen identity card and issue a new one with a fresh serial, but the number itself follows you for life, so there is no Israeli equivalent of closing a compromised account and opening another. What Israeli law does give you is a criminal offence that is easy to prove and a set of institutions each obliged to act on notice. Section 441 of the Penal Code 5737-1977 makes it an offence, carrying three years, to represent yourself falsely as another person, living or dead, with intent to defraud, and raises that to five years where the impersonation is of someone entitled under a will or by law to particular property and is done in order to obtain it. That second limb matters in inheritance cases, where the person using your details is often a relative positioning themselves against an estate. Alongside it, obtaining property by deceit under Section 415 covers what the impostor actually took. Report the identity card as lost or stolen to the Population and Immigration Authority even if you still hold it, because that entry is what institutions check, and file the police complaint with a written statement rather than a phone call so that a file number exists to quote to every bank afterwards.

Then work the registers in parallel, because each one is corrected separately and none of them talks to the others. Pull your credit data register file at the Bank of Israel to see which lenders are involved and what was reported; Section 38(d) of the Credit Data Law 5776-2016 gives you one free data concentration report a year, and the mechanics of obtaining it from overseas are set out in our answer on getting your Israeli credit file as a non-resident. Correction runs against the source that supplied the data, not against the bank that read it, so each lender needs its own written demand attaching the police file number. If a company has been registered using your details, that is a matter for the Registrar of Companies at the Corporations Authority and, where the Registrar will not simply amend, for a court application to correct the register; a directorship recorded in your name carries personal exposure for company debts and tax while it stands. Where an enforcement file has already opened against you at the Execution Office, do not ignore it because you were never served, since an unopposed file grows and can produce asset restrictions against a person who has not been in the country for twenty years.

Distance shapes the sequence more than the substance. Almost every step above can be done by an Israeli lawyer holding a specific power of attorney, and the document itself is cheap: a notary's authentication of your signature costs NIS 197 for the first signer, with a Magistrates' Court apostille at NIS 59, which is the whole practical cost of being able to act in four institutions at once. Give the lawyer an Israeli address for service so that future correspondence stops going to the address the impostor may have registered, and ask for a search of the Population Registry entry itself, since a changed address on the registry is both evidence and the mechanism the fraud depends on. Keep every letter you send, because the eventual argument with a bank is rarely about whether the fraud happened and almost always about the date on which the bank was told.

In Practice: Section 441 of the Penal Code 5737-1977 carries three years for impersonating another person with intent to defraud and five years where the impersonation is of a person entitled to property, which is the charge to cite in the complaint to the Israel Police. The identity number itself is never reissued, so report the card to the Population and Immigration Authority and then correct each register separately: Section 38(d) of the Credit Data Law 5776-2016 gives one free data concentration report a year from the Bank of Israel register, issued immediately online or in 7 to 21 days through a representative, and a company wrongly registered in your name is dealt with by the Registrar of Companies. The power of attorney that lets a lawyer do all of it costs NIS 197 for the notarial signature authentication plus NIS 59 for the apostille.

When to Consult a Lawyer

• An enforcement file, a restricted account marker or a tax assessment already exists in your name. Those are separate proceedings with their own deadlines, and each needs its own application; a police complaint does not suspend any of them.
• A company or a business licence has been registered using your details. Directorship carries personal liability for company debts and reporting failures while the entry stands, and removing it may need a court order rather than a letter to the Registrar.
• The person using your identity is a relative involved in a family estate. Section 441's aggravated limb and the succession proceedings interact, and the same evidence often supports an objection with the Inheritance Registrar.

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Speak With an Israeli Attorney

We file the police complaint in the form that opens a file, put the notices to banks, the Registrar and the credit data sources on the record with dates, and clear enforcement files opened against an identity you never used.

Contact us for a confidential initial consultation.