Some Chicago area high school and college students who bought fake IDs from China over the Internet got more than they bargained for when detectives knocked on their doors with some doubly bad news: Not only were they being arrested, but they might have given crooks more than enough information to steal their identities.

Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart said Friday that the arrests of 40 young people on misdemeanor charges over the last few weeks stemmed from a seizure earlier this year of 1,700 counterfeit driver’s licenses at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport that had been shipped from China.
He said during a news conference that the licenses seized had been hidden inside boxes of jewelry, toys and even a webcam and were bound for a handful of addresses in Chicago and the suburbs before being distributed to the young people who paid between $75 and $100 for them. He said the fakes were of “incredibly high quality” and even had the same kinds of markings, including water marks, that are on real licenses.

The young people, between 17 and 20 years old, were easy to track down, in large part because they were not as careful to change their names as they were birthdates and addresses. Some even chose to buy fake licenses for states other than Illinois — South Dakota and Wisconsin among them.

Those who were arrested could have been charged with a felony. But Dart said they were issued citations for the misdemeanor charge of attempting to possess a fraudulent driver’s license, ordered to serve 25 hours community service and, in some cases, fined.

Federal authorities are asking for the public’s help in locating Gautam Gupta, a physician now wanted on fraud charges whose ads promising weight loss are well-known in the Chicago area.

The Chicago area will continue to swelter today, but a big chill is on the way that could send temperatures plunging 30 degrees by Thursday.

Severe weather hit parts of the Chicago area after the National Weather Service declared a severe thunderstorm warning this afternoon, as a thunderstorm watch for much of northeast Illinois was declared over by the National Weather Service.

Lightning strikes from this afternoon’s fast-moving thunderstorms that moved through the Chicago area are believed responsible for two house fires in the same Joliet subdivision.

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The worst of the heavy thunderstorms have left the Chicago area, but the rain they left behind  is resulting in flash flood warnings throughout northern Illinois.

With humid air spreading over the Chicago area, temperatures should climb into the 80s Sunday under partly cloudy skies that could produce sometimes heavy thunderstorms.

The Chicago area basked today in its second summerlike day in row, but the National Weather Service was warning of scattered thunderstorms and hail with winds of more than 60 mph.

Sales of existing homes in the nine-county Chicago-area fell 9.9 percent in the first-quarter from their pace a year ago, to 12,937 homes sold, while the first-quarter median price of $155,000 was down 11.7 percent from the first three months of 2010,…