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Comment by zhivota | Hacker News Reader

The right solution here is to take the telecom tax invoice, edit it in a PDF editor to say Telecom bill, and send it back.

The process is stupid enough that this will work 95% of the time. Is it fraud? No, not really, I'd argue. You're just conforming the document to an arbitrary standard, but all the relevant details are factual, not fraudulent.

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I can confirm that this is the exact method recommended in forums where people and businesses that meet adversity from banks on a daily basis (most of the time for completely legitimate businesses, sometimes not) congregate to share advice.

The point is to feed the compliance critters exactly what they want so they can tick their boxes without sticking their necks out.

That was my first thought as I was reading. Of course, I imagine almost every serious business would be extremely uncomfortable doing something like that. On the other hand, if the alternative is getting your account closed anyway, there's not much to lose.

In my country, there is no single document that shows my name and address that is acceptable as a document for address verification in many western fintech applications.

If you're renting, bills will arrive in the name of the owner, even though I personally pay them each month.

We don't really do lease agreements either, except for very rare circumstances.

If you own a property, you could go to the public registry, then translate that, notarize and _maybe_ it will work. But I don't own any property.

We don't even get a PDF for the bills, it's just a HTML table with a few lines of CSS.

So I simply change the owner's name to mine in that table, save as PDF and send that. Never failed.

And at that point, why even have this process at all?

It is misrepresentation unless you tell them you doctored it.

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