Fraudacity is a six-episode video series featuring SentiLink Head of Fraud Insights David Maimon.
In this episode, Dr. Maimon digs into how fake IDs have evolved over the years, and how advances in technology and AI have made it easier than ever for fraudsters to generate realistic identity documents that are virtually indistinguishable from the real thing.
Future episodes of Fraudacity will be released here on the SentiLink blog, and also on Youtube. A lightly-edited transcript of the video is available below:
Fake IDs used to fool bouncers. Today, they fool banks.
In this episode, I’m going to tell you the story of how the fake ID supply chain went corporate, from dark web marketplaces to Telegram to fully staffed platforms with AI agents generating passports on demand. If you’re a fraud fighter, this is the version you need to know about.
Fake driver licenses and passports could be purchased across the United States for a long time. But in 2011, something interesting happened: the first underground market was developed. It allowed you to purchase illicit commodities such as drugs and weapons, but also identities and fake driver licenses. The first real underground market that supported that venture was called the Silk Road.
Silk Road was created in 2011 and operated for around two and a half years. It offered a slew of commodities to its customers, including all types of drugs and all kinds of digital goods, including compromised bank accounts. If you clicked on the Forgeries tab, you could also purchase fake driver licenses and fake passports for reasonable prices.
Starting in 2013, in addition to fake driver licenses and fake passports, we started to see vendors selling fake prescription notes. We also started to see vendors selling machines that would allow you to create those fake documents, along with other documents that could be used in verification processes, such as bank statements, utility bills, and so on.
So from 2013 forward, we saw a lot of markets being developed and offering those types of commodities for sale. In 2017, we saw more and more vendors opting to create their own shops on darknet markets. This was essentially the beginning of the second era: the fragmentation era.
In this era, criminal vendors created their own shops on darknet markets, offering fake documentation across a wide range of prices. In addition to setting up shop on darknet markets, we also saw a lot of criminals opening shops in messaging applications such as Telegram, talking about their operations and selling driver licenses and passports there as well.
One interesting development that many vendors took advantage of in the context of their criminal operations was financial institutions’ decision to allow consumers to onboard with only images of their driver licenses and passports when creating new accounts.
Many vendors shifted gears and offered not only hard copies of fake driver licenses and passports, but also templates for the driver license of any state in the United States. You could also purchase passport templates. Then, as a fraudster, all you had to do was type in the information yourself using a computer and Photoshop, plus a printer, and simply produce the document on your own.
If you had gone to those websites to purchase driver license or passport templates, you could have chosen from many different payment methods: credit or debit cards, Bitcoin, obviously, gift cards, and other types of payment solutions.
In 2021, a major development happened in the online fraud ecosystem: standalone websites emerged that allowed you to create your own passports and driver licenses. In 2022, the platform era came to fruition. 2021 was when we first saw Veriftools.
Veriftools was one of those websites that allowed you to take your own photo, or a photo of someone you wanted to create a passport for, upload it to the website, and then type in all the information you wanted on the passport or driver license. That included the name, date of birth, and, if you needed it, a Social Security number. After spending five minutes on the website and paying $10, you had created your own image of a fake passport or driver license.
In addition to Veriftools, another popular website fraudsters have been using since 2021 is called OnlyFake. OnlyFake works in a very similar way. All you have to do is take an image of the person you want to create a fake document for, upload it to the website, type in the relevant information, and pay the fee, which is typically less than $10. After a few minutes, you get a picture of a fake passport or driver license that fraudsters can use to try to onboard with a bank, creditor, or lender and facilitate their fraudulent operations.
To engage in fraud during the platform era, you had to have a picture to work with to produce the fake driver license or passport. A lot of images were lifted from real victims’ Facebook and Twitter accounts to be used in fraudulent operations. If you were a fraudster and wanted to produce a fake driver license or passport, you needed someone’s face.
In 2023, we started to see signs of criminals using AI to facilitate different types of fraudulent operations. One interesting thing we saw criminals do was create faces from scratch, bring them onto the platforms, and create driver licenses and passports, which allowed them to bypass many of the security solutions available at the time.
To counter this, many financial institutions hired security and verification solutions that required customers to provide some evidence of life. One solution many vendors had in mind was to ask consumers to take a picture of themselves with their driver license or passport, and to turn their heads left and right.
AI simplified the process of bypassing those solutions as well. Criminals could take the images and fake driver licenses they created with the tools we discussed earlier, run them through AI tools that were (and still are) available, and simply bring those images to life, allowing them to verify identities and turn their heads left, right, up, and down.
Read more: From Silk Road to Synthetic Faces: The Evolution of the Online Fake Document Economy
