> a dropdown list of acceptable documents: a lease agreement, rates notice, tax document, utilities bill, or telecommunications bill.
It’s baffling to me that these types of (usually unsigned in both the electronic and the ink way, not that the latter would prove anything in a scan) PDFs are still somehow the gold standard for “proofs” of address.
In many countries worldwide that's the reasonable best option. A scan of a physically signed piece of paper is no better, anyone could've signed it. So long as there is no global standard for digitally signed documents, that's what we're stuck with, no?
While you can always outright commit fraud, there are many jurisdictions where there are decently strong forms of proof that go beyond a letter.
Things like tax numbers with addresses associated to them, official address registers... hell, a lot of ID cards in many jurisdictions just have your address printed on it!
Now, again, fraud is possible, but "I registered my drivers license to a fake address" is a bit of a higher hurdle than "I edited my utility PDF to show the right address".
Though there's a bit of a blessing in things like PDFs being easily editable, in that many badly organized criminals will likely do it haphazardly, leading to messy metadata, or even more amateur hour stuff around just having the font be wrong or the like. More opportunities for a fraudster to trip up, so to speak.
In countries where you do have e.g. tax numbers associated with addresses no government agency is going to give it to a random private company. I've lived in many countries both in the EU and outside of it and I can think of only a few countries where you actually could do something better than a pdf — and they use digital signatures.
A bank is not a random private company.
In Finland, people are supposed to have a single official address. When you move, the government informs banks and other businesses that have a legitimate reason to know your official address, unless you have opted out. There are a few exceptions, such as temporary addresses and international relocations, where you have to give the new address yourself.
I don't know about the rest of the EU but France just has national ID cards with your address printed on the back! No need for anything fancy there.
In both Australia and Japan there are tax numbers used for corporate identity verification (remember: here we're talking about a Wise account used for a business)
> France just has national ID cards with your address printed on the back! No need for anything fancy there.
Is a scan/photo of a government ID that much more reliable, though?
Physical IDs are designed to be validated in person because they're hard to replicate. That's not the case for a scan/photo of an ID.
So a couple of things:
- I don’t know for France but for Japan one of the ID cards (My Number cards) have RFID chips in them. This means that KYC procedures can involve both scanning the card with your phone, and then doing some video “turn your head” verification stuff
- even absent that, video-based KYC flows (which I see a lot of) just leave less margin of error for fraudsters. And for people being honest, a national ID card is yet another way for someone to have proof, despite their other circumstances
There’s always going to be people in edge cases of course, I just feel like leaning on ID cards that many jurisdictions have is straightforward
One big problem I see with that is that, while almost all passports and EU ID cards now support ICAO cryptographic document validation standards, there's usually no publicly accessible revocation list for these.
Combine that with the absence of any built-in user verification (some national schemes have a PIN code, but the track record of that isn't great), and it becomes clear why these documents don't fully solve the problem of strong identity verification.
>Is a scan/photo of a government ID that much more reliable, though?
There is a DataMatrix barcode containing the same data plus a digital signature from the government. The Wikipedia page for this specific barcode happens to show the back of the French national ID card as its example:
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/2D-Doc
> In countries where you do have e.g. tax numbers associated with addresses no government agency is going to give it to a random private company.
Why not? In my country the company registry is public, anyone can pay a small fee to get an official certificate of a company's address and company number.
We're talking about different things, what you're describing is the opposite problem. The vast majority of the customers are people, not companies, and no information will be released about them.
The post we're discussing is about a company, so I think that's the relevant case. (And for what it's worth the registry I'm talking about also applies to sole proprietors, at least those who've registered for the associated tax treatment).
Does it necessarily need to be a global standard? Just starting with the ones that do have a digital signature infrastructure would be something. The EU has eIDAS, which already covers 27 countries, for example.
Yes, I've edited a pdf before before sending to get though bureaucracy. Not to lie of course, but to get around some BS requirement or hide sensitive information. Was libreoffice draw? or inkscape or something, then you can delete the metadata too from a cli in linux.
The OP doesn't know this but the first rep. just gave him the blueprint on how to "preserve" and "stamp-approve" his account regardless of whether he has a legitimate business or not. He just needed to get "that" paper and move on. It is a process of document collection not a real verification for business purposes.
> It is a process of document collection not a real verification for business purposes.
I wish we could as a society move on from rituals paying tribute to what used to be an authentication method, towards one that actually constitutes one today.
For more serious stuff in AU there is Justice of the Peace (basically a qualified volunteer but not necessarily a lawyer) who can certify the copy. This can then be scanned and has the JP stamp and signature. Sort of handy as it is a distributed network, so you dont need to queue at a post office and get someone to eye up your docs and fill in a form.
> [...] who can certify the copy. This can then be scanned [...]
Seems like you're back to square one: Having to trust a scan of an authentic document.
In the US (for financial things) that's called a medallion guarantee and you can walk into a bank and get them to authenticate it.
For other things there are notaries public.
Walk into a bank is no longer possible in Finland, regardless of the purpose.
Most branch offices have been closed. The bigger part of the remaining ones are appointment only and getting an appointment can take weeks.
Very few offer cash and similar day to day services without appointment, but only very short hours. People who cannot use cards or the internet will queue in the street.
So like the modern challengers, traditional banks just offer no customer service deserving the name.
Well obviously Finnish people wouldn't design a system where you talk to another human.
Though not any telco bill, it has to be a landline. Otherwise you could spin up a mobile contract and it would be easy. If you're a single person company/consultant they'll accept a personal bank statement (having just gone through this runaround myself).
That's even more absurd. What if I don't have a landline, or somebody else in my household is paying for it?
It seems to be for offices where you'd have a lease agreement. But even my accountant's letter was refused as not proof enough. I believe you can have HMRC send something, but they're not exactly quick and Wise wanted something more urgently. The strange thing is they didn't ask until months after the account was set up and had already approved proof of incorporation for the registered address.