Fridnel Lerick, 29, of Providence, earlier this year was sentenced for falsifying driver’s licenses while working at the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles.

The Boston Globe / Cyrus Moghtader

As state police began investigating an alleged driver’s license scam at the Rhode Island registry one year ago, their Massachusetts counterparts had recently unraveled two strikingly similar schemes in Greater Boston.

One of those schemes involved a Providence man, Fridnel Lerick, 29, who in May began serving a one-year sentence for falsifying driver’s licenses when he was a clerk at the motor vehicle registry in Boston’s Chinatown.

Whether the Rhode Island and Massachusetts registry scams are linked is unclear.

“It’s similar type of activity, but I don’t see [Massachusetts] as connected to this,” said Capt. Stephen Lynch, detective commander of the Rhode Island State Police. “Right now, we don’t make that connection.” Lynch said, however, that state police were unfamiliar with the Lerick case.

What is clear is that these types of schemes have been uncovered across the country, according to the FBI.

In Virginia, for instance, two clerks were caught in 2003 after allegedly producing about 1,000 fraudulent licenses in a scam dating back to 1998, according to the FBI. In January, a New York man was sentenced to nearly 20 years for bribing a registry clerk in the District of Columbia to make up more than 900 driver’s licenses.

Typically, the “license rings” operate in similar ways: corrupt registry clerks work with middlemen, who sell the licenses to illegal immigrants, criminals, and others looking to cover their identities.

The driver’s licenses are perfect “breeder” documents for establishing a false identity, one that can allow the license holder to buy guns, launder money, open bank accounts, and board a plane. Four years ago, the FBI’s assistant director of counterterrorism testified before a House committee about how the licenses are used by terrorists to escape detection.

The two licensing schemes in Massachusetts, and the alleged Rhode Island scheme, bear similar hallmarks and underscore vulnerabilities at state agencies which handle sensitive information about millions of people.

Lerick, who graduated from Johnson & Wales University in 2000 with a degree in business management, went to work a year later at the Chinatown registry in Boston. He was convicted on May 7 for running a license-fraud scheme during the nearly five years he worked there.

Lerick falsified 17 operator’s licenses, attempting to falsify two others, and was guilty of two counts of identity theft, according to the Massachusetts Office of Attorney General.

Three weeks after Lerick was convicted, a Massachusetts jury convicted a Billerica man of running a similar scam through which he bribed two other registry clerks, who issued at least 100 false licenses, according to the attorney general’s office.

Coincidentally, Lerick bought a house in the Elmwood section of Providence in 2005, close to the given addresses of at least half a dozen of those charged in the Rhode Island scheme.

Meanwhile, the Rhode Island DMV has fired the two Registry clerks, Dolores Rodriguez LaFlamme and Soraya Santiago, who allegedly fraudulently issued licenses to at least 28 people.

LaFlamme was fired on Monday, and Santiago on Oct. 23, according to a spokeswoman for the state Department of Administration. LaFlamme and Santiago had been on paid administrative leave after their arrests, until Oct. 19, then on unpaid leave up until they were fired, the spokeswoman said.

The state police allege that LaFlamme and Santiago worked with two middlemen, who were paid bribes of between $2,500 and $3,000 by people who were seeking licenses.

Some of the operators of the rings in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New York and Florida were convicted drug dealers who dealt in large quantities of cocaine and marijuana. Some, like LaFlamme, were illegal immigrants.

LaFlamme remains in federal custody on a deportation order, said a spokeswoman for the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Boston.

While the state police here say they do not currently see any connection between the Rhode Island and Massachusetts rings, at least several of the men charged in Rhode Island have criminal records in Massachusetts, including charges for using fraudulent licenses.

One case stands out for the sheer number of bogus identities.

The police say Modesto Rivera fraudulently obtained a Rhode Island license through LaFlamme. Rivera has four other Massachusetts licenses, all with different names, Social Security numbers and dates of birth, and a total of nine aliases.

Police in Abington, Mass., learned of Rivera’s numerous identities after they arrested him for drug dealing in May.

Rivera gave them a license with the name of Carlos Reyes. After a detective recognized Rivera as someone he had arrested under a different name, the police checked with the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles. They ran the license through a facial-recognition device; the scan produced three other licenses, all with the same photograph.

How could that happen?

“We don’t comment on investigations. We can’t comment on whether it was picked up or not,” said Ann Dufresne, spokeswoman for the Massachusetts registry. Dufresne said the registry began using the facial-recognition program in the spring of 2006.

Three of “Rivera’s” licenses — under different aliases — were obtained prior to that date, according to Dufresne.

But Rivera did obtain a driver’s license under the name Carlos Reyes in March of this year — after the facial-recognition unit was in place, and, according to Dufresne, was scanning each photograph automatically.

“Is it a foolproof system? No. It’s one tool,” said Dufresne. “It’s one security tool that we have, but it’s not a perfect security tool.”

The system compares “biometric points” of a person’s face, to see if there is a potential match, Dufresne said. “We program the biometrics so that we’re not getting too many false positives.”

Dufresne said all photos — approximately 5,000 per day in Massachusetts — are scanned and entered into a database. “You can’t process a license unless you put it into the database,” she added.

Meanwhile, Lynch, of the Rhode Island State Police, said a New York man accused of getting a license through this state’s Registry was arrested in New York City on Friday.

Leonardo Polanco, 30, is being extradited to Rhode Island today. His Rhode Island license had a Cranston address.

The state police are still searching for one of the two middlemen and 17 other license-holders. They are also following the bribery money to determine where it was going, said Lynch.

amilkovi@projo.com