US and Dutch authorities eliminate the false identification market fed with crypto

Dutch and American police have closed the false identification market online Veriftools, which sold falsified documentation for only $ 9 in cryptocurrencies.

According A press release Published on Thursday, the Dutch cyber crimes police obtained control of two physical data servers in Amsterdam, while taking advantage of 21 virtual servers.

They worked in collaboration with the FBI, which seized two domains used by the Veriftools marketas well as a promotional blog.

Both the FBI and the identity fraud and the experience document center in the Netherlands had conducted research on veriftools, with the FBI determining that the market had generated around $ 6.4 million in revenues.

Similarly, the Dutch authorities estimate that veriftools had an annual turnover of approximately € 1.3 million (around $ 1.5 million), which makes it one of the largest suppliers of fraudulent identity documents internationally.

According to the reports, the market worked when demanding users to load a passport photo and enter false data, that the site operators used to generate a false identification. FBI agents were able to request false driver’s licenses for the State of New Mexico, paying counterfeit identifications with cryptography, although specific currencies were not identified.

Once delivered, false identifications are often used to avoid KYC safeguards or commit fraud, and the police in Wales meet the veriftool market in the process of a fraud investigation.

The Veriftools URL now takes browsers to a splash page, which announces that the website has been seized by the application agencies of the Dutch and American law.

“The elimination of this market is an important step to protect the public from fraud and the crime of identity theft,” said Philip Russell, a special interim agent in charge of the FBI albuquerque division. “Together with our partners, we will continue attacking and dismantling the platforms on which criminals depend, regardless of where they operate.”

In their press release, the Dutch police report that they will continue to investigate the data found in the seized servers, which will use in an effort to locate the administrators of Veriftools.

According to experts, the production and distribution of false IDs has not only become a big business, but is growing rapidly.

“The fixation of exact figures is difficult given the illegal nature of trade, but most estimates place the global false identification market somewhere in billions of dollars,” said Kartik Venkatesh, head of global innovation of the GBG identity technology firm.

Venkatesh told him Decipher That today’s false identifications are much more sophisticated than the “raw” imitations of the last decades, using industrial level machinery and micrometric rolling thickness.

“Many include holograms, polycarbonate layers, barcodes that scan properly and UV reactive ink, making them almost indistinguishable from genuine documents without specialized equipment,” he explained.

And what this leap has promoted in quality is a greater demand, which has provided the conditions for an illegal market for “prosperous” illegal tools that also Includes identifications generated by AI.

“Production is now slippery and international, with websites that resemble professionals of professional commerce stores,” he said. “Buyers carry details, pay in cryptocurrencies and receive hidden falsifications within everyday items.”

In fact, Venkatesh reports that some vendors even offer return policies, guarantees and guidance on how to use identifications convincingly.

From their point of view, the solution to the growth of false identification markets is to invest in sophisticated identification verification systems, which are already helping some companies and authorities to detect falsifications.

“By placing documents analysis, facial biometry, life detection and behavior signs,” he said, “they can detect invisible inconsistencies for human inspection.”

It also suggests that digital IDs can have a role to play in the long term, since their cryptographic design makes them more difficult to falsify, while they can instantly verify with the emitting authorities.

However, although they also allow selective dissemination, Venkatesh warned that digital identities will attract their own forms of abuse. He observed “linked synthetic IDS of real and false data and Biometry of Defake designed to deceive the controls of life, to the theft of credentials if someone’s phone wallet or id is compromised.”

Because of this, he argued that the future will reside in the “balance” and layers in layers.

“Digital identifications can raise the ribbon for scammers,” he said, “but only when combined with a multiple layer verification that can adapt to new attack vectors.”