According to the New York Daily News, undocumented immigrant, Anthony Andrew Fernandez, also called Leslie Patrick Cumberbatch stole the identity of former Newark resident, Sean Booker.

Booker’s widow, Sharon, stumbled on the ruse when she opened a letter addressed to him with a North Carolina postmark. The letter indicated that he had gotten a traffic ticket on May 5 in Tarbor, N.C. She had a fleeting moment of hope that her husband had somehow survived, the newspaper stated.

Police are now searching for the fiend whose last known address was in Brooklyn.

"If he found Sean's license, I want it back," Sharon Booker said after learning the truth. "It makes me feel awful to think that he might have something of Sean's."

Linda Foley, executive director of victims services at the Identity Theft Resource Center in San Diego, said the Sean Booker case might be only the beginning.

"My guess is that this is not a unique story, but that this is just the first one we're hearing about," the paper quoted her as saying.

Victims of the World Trade Center attacks are considered prime targets for identity thefts because of the significant amount of personal information their loved ones made public in the hope of finding them alive.

Authorities do not know how the man who stole Sean Booker's identity did it, but they speculate enough information could have been gleaned from Internet sites or newspaper articles.

Booker's driver's license also could have been found in the Trade Center rubble, they say.

Detective Lt. Carol Benson of the Tarboro Police Department has been working on the case with Marc Berlin, an investigator for the major financial crimes squad in the New Jersey Division of Criminal Justice.

Police say Fernandez is in the United States illegally, but they don't know when he returned to the country after being deported to his native Guyana in 1998 because of a drug charge.