Harper said that business identity theft is often a lurking problem that slips under the radar of both state officials and law enforcement. Harper said that officials himself included often don't know what to look for. "I was asked by our previous Secretary of State, Curt Browning, to look into the problem. I read some articles on it but didn't see much evidence of it here in Florida," Harper told ITworld.

Then Harper said a case came across his desk that woke him up to the corporate identity theft problem. "We had a business and aviation company - that had been dissolved by the owners. It was then reinstated by some identity thieves. Soon after, they applied for a $140,000 federal fuel tax credit, which was delivered as a check. The scammers and the money disappeared and the previous owners only learned about it when the IRS came knocking on their door."

Harper said that, when learned about the scam, he realized that the Division of Corporations wasn't looking for the right clues. Rather than trying to identify fraudulent filings, the Division instructed its employees to start looking for innocuous-seeming changes that correlated with business identity theft scams. Those included sudden changes in the registered agent or mailing address of a company. "Once people started looking for that, we discovered a fairly high amount of (identity theft)," Harper said.

In the last decade, secretaries of state across the U.S. have moved business registries and filing systems online as a convenience to taxpayers and also to save money. Unfortunately, that move online hasn't gone hand-in-hand with tighter security. Lax business registration systems are the norm in the U.S., and they're also a common denominator in business identity theft scams, say officials in other states that have confronted the problem.

In Florida, officials at the Division of Corporations uncovered 40 known cases of fraudulent business filings with damages of up to $360,000 in one case, said Karen Ellis who was hired by the State of Florida in May to spearhead its efforts to stem the business identity fraud and abuse.