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Comment by DoreenMichele | Hacker News Reader

If you aren’t receiving support from Shelter or one of our other partners, you won’t be able to access the No Fixed Address programme.

Well, I hope it helps some people but color me unimpressed. It's hard to prove homelessness and some people don't qualify for services and etc.

I wish some bank would pull its head out of its butt, accept an email address as adequate contact info and let people pick things up at the local branch (like a new debit card).

Online banking is encouraged anytime you, say, try to call the bank these days. They have the capability to implement this.

They could do it quietly and not make it "a homeless program."

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>accept an email address as adequate contact info

I wonder if the international anti terrorism / anti money laundering regulations are making that more difficult. For example N26 was under fire for not doing much to verify identities in this regard.

ID verification can be done with ID/driver's license or tax records though - the address shouldn't matter and as I explained in other comments the vast majority of documents requested as proofs of address are trivial to forge anyway.

Banks can't decide these things on a whim. They are heavily regulated.

Regulators don’t just invent rules randomly. Banks are in regular communication with regulators about what (they think) the right rules should be.

Regulator here, previously in the industry. I'm utterly appalled at how much 'useless'(1) info banks require to provide a service as simple as opening an account. neither the Rgulator/Supervisor nor AML bodies require them to collect so much before providing so little. Most of the time, regulation = proportionality.

(1) unless they do data mining, but that's another story.

Outside of the obvious money laundering issues, there are other regulatory reasons why a bank would need to verify where a person resides, including taxation, data management requirements and if the person is even allowed to have an account in the first place.

But I completely agree with your general point, in that banks could probably work with way less information than they are requiring now. For instance a valid ID with any proof that you reside in the country you open the bank account in should be enough, no need for an exact address, or proof of employment etc.

Currently most of their requests are to weed out low margin customers. Proof of it, there are actual banks that already work on a "prepaid" basis providing very little service outside of storing money, and they effectively only need an official ID and a phone number (provided the ID will have a residence and more info)

I'm sure they can't do that because it makes money laundering trivial. Makes it waaaaay to easy to invent fake people.

ID requirements would still apply (and be a serious obstacle to invent fake people), it's just about the address verification.

You don't need to invent fake people, just use the ID of a real one.

If someone opened a bank account with your ID and name, would you ever know? A checking account doesn't gain interest so there will be no tax filing about paltry amounts, and if they don't frame you or overdraft the account then or never use an institution that you'll ever use then what? Its not like the statements will ever come to your address.

Unlike USA, most countries have a more stringent ID system so that this scenario simply does not happen. Like, it technically can happen but in practice does not - I spent a few years working in a bank on fraud, and we had zero cases of a forged ID. We had attempts with stolen IDs (there's an electronic database of IDs reported lost/stolen, but there's a time gap until people report that), we had gangs trying to use homeless people (with their real IDs) for money laundering, we had all kinds of interesting fraud schemes but zero cases of forged IDs used to open accounts.

An ID is hard to forge (again, as far as I understand in USA it's different because USA doesn't have a proper ID system) - counterfeiting currency is simpler than passports, and has ways of remote verification (banks use it to e.g. verify when their customers have been declared dead which has all kinds of financial obligations to the institution) so you'd generally need to get someone in the actual government agency to issue a real fictitious ID; that's definitely possible but very rare, that's within the domain of sophisticated organized crime and costly/risky enough to make it not worth it for simple fraud - like, getting a real poor person with a real ID to do what you want is simpler and cheaper, so that's what criminals did.

Also it's risky to use, as forging IDs is a felony by itself, and you'd risk immediate arrest by going to a bank and trying to use it; I believe we had one fraudster arrested in the branch when trying to use a stolen ID, it was more than a decade ago so I don't remember the details.

So someone opening a bank account with my ID and name would require my passport being stolen without noticing it and, crucially, when I do notice it and report it (to get a replacement) the old ID is invalidated, that bank would get notified and the account would get blocked at that point as the fraudster can't provide the replacement ID. Of course, all of that isn't possible with a central registry of IDs which seems anathema to USA and UK, but is successfully used in many other countries.

You can just go on forums like crimemarket.cn and find hundreds of people using fake IDs to open bank accounts in Germany. It's really not unusual at all in Europe. Banks don't do much to verify IDs, they almost never even check basic security features like OVI and OVD. Usually they don't even bother with UV.

Anyone can print flawless Romanian ID cards with an inkjet printer and some teslin sheets at home, those are valid everywhere in Europe and you can even safely fly with them (outside of Romania, obviously) if you feel so inclined.

The printing inside the country is so inconsistent that they're literally impossible to authenticate offline https://temp.sh/oZGbx/ROMANIAID.pdf

Have you seen what Greek ID cards look like?

Every day, thousands of bank accounts are opened around Europe with fake IDs.

> Also it's risky to use, as forging IDs is a felony by itself, and you'd risk immediate arrest by going to a bank and trying to use it

Except not really because you'd just make sure that the ID is good before you go to the bank. Just compare against a real one or check on PRADO.

Have you seen the scale of leaks over the past decade?

The point is that nobody would know that a stolen/copied id was being used and everyone gets to pat themselves on the back that the financial system is safe from illicit actors when they would have no way of knowing.

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