According to the publication, every day the site generates about 20 thousand documents. To add additional realism to the purchased image, you can select a different background on which the document will be shown. The Bitcoin address used by the OnlyFake service received bitcoins worth more than $23.5 thousand (RUB 2.13 million). However, the service also accepts many other cryptocurrencies, so the total earnings of portal owners can be much higher.
In Russia (*country sponsor of terrorism), this portal is also in demand. The editors of CNews discovered several Telegram channels with several hundred subscribers each, where participants share generated photographs of documents with each other.
By the way, the statements of the portal’s authors that it is based on a neural network may be false. 404 Media employees have found no evidence that the service uses generative tools based on artificial intelligence. “I don’t know exactly how it works, but I suspect they are using some kind of technology to insert/replace an image into a document template,” Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley and one of the world’s experts, told the publication. on digital image manipulation.
Also on this site there is a service for generating barcodes for Russian and American driver’s licenses. Instructions for creating a domestic driver’s license are given in Russian.
As 404 Media experts write, they managed to deceive one of these resources using a previously received photograph of a document. In particular, they were able to bypass the security of the OKX cryptocurrency exchange with a fake British passport. During authorization, the OKX system asked to take a photo of the ID card with the smartphone camera – 404 Media employees pointed the camera at the OnlyFake-generated photo of the fake ID card displayed on the laptop screen, and the system successfully recognized the document, after which the verification was passed.
First-hand information
The publication’s staff also managed to contact the owner of OnlyFake. He told them that the service could be used to bypass verification on a variety of sites, including Binance, Revolut, Wise, Kraken, Bybit, Payoneer, Huobi, Airbnb, OKX and Coinbase.
He also told 404 Media that the service’s development team began creating document templates three years ago. The service generator itself has been in development for “almost a year and a half.” The developers created this service by giving it access to a large collection of images of identity documents.
