Comment by bbbbb5 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bbbbb5 | Hacker News Reader

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> actually useful identity cards

It costs like 100 euros to buy a fake ID that'll work at any bank in Germany. This is a bizarre trope oft-repeated on HN by techies who think that banks actually verify chipped ID cards, they do not. And even if they did, they have to accept a plenty of EU IDs which do not have chips.

Google and look at how a Greek ID card looks like, it's literally a piece of paper.

> opening fake bank accounts for mules very difficult

Are you being sarcastic? https://crimemarket.is/ ctrl-f for BD, there are literally hundreds of people offering german bank accounts.

On the same forum you will find people selling Kleinanzeigen accounts, and DHL insiders creating fake tracking IDs for Kleinanzeigen scams.

> almost all scams rely on personal contact instead - the most common scheme is fake policemen, where the callcenter will call elderly people and pressure them to go to their bank to draw cash, then a "policeman" shows up at the door and takes the cash.

This isn't true at all. Those scams happen, but they're the minority. You can search for "OB Cashing" on crimemarket, that's the term of art they use for calling up grandmothers and convincing them to empty their bank accounts.

> It costs like 100 euros to buy a fake ID that'll work at any bank in Germany. This is a bizarre trope oft-repeated on HN by techies who think that banks actually verify chipped ID cards, they do not. And even if they did, they have to accept a plenty of EU IDs which do not have chips.

I'm not talking about the eID chip, that isn't verified indeed - but at least in my experience, when opening a bank account in person, they do diligent checks, for non-German cards they even have a database how different nations' ID cards should look like and what the security markings are.

Video-Ident aka holding your ID card into your webcam is indeed vulnerable, and banks like N26 got in really hot water, which forced them to ramp up their anti-fraud measures to a degree even legitimate customers got massively impacted [1].

> On the same forum you will find people selling Kleinanzeigen accounts, and DHL insiders creating fake tracking IDs for Kleinanzeigen scams.

Yes, dark markets exist. But their scale, still, is vastly lower than the US, where you have shit like virtually all Americans' information being sold online that is necessary to open lines of credit and do other kinds of fraud. Stuff like tax refund scams or SSN's being abused by illegal immigrants simply does not exist here (again: at least not at a relevant scale), because we have modern systems in place.

> This isn't true at all. Those scams happen, but they're the minority. You can search for "OB Cashing" on crimemarket, that's the term of art they use for calling up grandmothers and convincing them to empty their bank accounts.

The classic scams are the majority, and yet even these they yield the scammers only something like 13 million euros a year [2], that's laughable compared to the amount Americans lose, even if one assumes that only a tenth of the cases gets reported at all.

And again: entire classes of scams like "I got arrested and need bail money" or "I was involved in a traffic accident and need to pay the hospital cash advance for treatment" don't work here because we don't have cash bail or bills from hospitals and people know that. If you would try this scam on any European, they'd laugh you off because they know that this doesn't exist.

[1] https://www.golem.de/news/internetbetrug-so-sperrt-n26-im-ka...

[2] https://www.sueddeutsche.de/panorama/kriminalitaet-stuttgart...

>but at least in my experience, when opening a bank account in person, they do diligent checks

Most banks don't even have UV lights, not that fake IDs don't usually have decent UV markings anyway. Hardly very diligent.

>for non-German cards they even have a database how different nations' ID cards should look like and what the security markings are.

As do essentially all banks in the world, doesn't save you though. Many European IDs (Romanian, Greek for example) do not have any meaningful security features, Romanian IDs can look completely different depending on which day and which city they're printed in and there's no reference guide for this.

Even a good enough German fake won't cost much https://telegra.ph/ID-Cloning-Only-12-17 The hologram isn't perfect, but that'll work at any bank.

>Video-Ident aka holding your ID card into your webcam is indeed vulnerable, and banks like N26 got in really hot water, which forced them to ramp up their anti-fraud measures to a degree even legitimate customers got massively impacted [1].

Pretty much any fake ID that'll pass Video-Ident will generally work at the bank too.

>The classic scams are the majority, and yet even these they yield the scammers only something like 13 million euros a year [2], that's laughable compared to the amount Americans lose, even if one assumes that only a tenth of the cases gets reported at all.

This is totally wrong, there are individual people running car-selling scams on mobile.de netting more than that.

>And again: entire classes of scams like "I got arrested and need bail money" or "I was involved in a traffic accident and need to pay the hospital cash advance for treatment" don't work here because we don't have cash bail or bills from hospitals and people know that. If you would try this scam on any European, they'd laugh you off because they know that this doesn't exist.

Those scams are common in the US and UK, but they only make up a small part of the $ losses. The bulk of the losses comes in the form of people losing all of their savings as their bank account is emptied.

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