Almost the entire process is automated. In this case, the client only needs to select the desired country and type of document, and then enter the necessary information in the fields – place of birth, date of birth, registration, etc.
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.
This site also offers to buy high-quality passport templates with a resolution of 1200 dpi for more than 50 countries in PSD format for further editing, for example, in Photoshop and creating not a virtual, but a real fake. Such templates cost much more than just a virtual photograph – for example, for a PSD file with a Russian passport, the owners of the service ask $55, or about 5,000 rubles.
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.
Third-party experts interviewed by 404 Media found that many users use this service for carding (bank card fraud), creating fake bank accounts, and also to unlock their accounts on crypto exchanges, where this requires showing a passport. For example, this is practiced by the Binance exchange.
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.