For $200, You Can Trade Crypto With a Fake ID

A black market is flourishing for “verified” accounts on major exchanges including Coinbase Pro and Binance US, a CoinDesk investigation found. Read the full article by: Anna Baydakova

Key Points:

• While most legitimate crypto users have to go through a long onboarding process, including scanning a picture of their id and taking a selfies in some cases, criminals are paying around $200 to for a verified account with someone else’s name.

• People in the blackmarket are taking other peoples names or creating fake ones to trick the exchanges into verifying these accounts and then selling them on forums.

• They are also making fraudulent accounts Cash app and Transferwise. “We are producing from 1,500 to 2,000 synthetic verified accounts each month,” an operator of one such service told CoinDesk in an interview via the Telegram messaging app.

• In addition to ready-to-use accounts, the black-market vendors offer “on-demand, almost a la carte services, based on customer needs,” Gunn said.

• They can help their “clients” register fraudulent accounts by selling compromised personal data or “offering support during any step of the verification process,” including digital rendering of faces to pass photo and video verification, which major crypto exchanges often require.

• “Some of these accounts are dormant until money moves through them, and if a real person verified them how would they know?” he said. “Security measures [implemented by the platforms] are pretty good, but there is always a way around.”