Hacker News Reader

Comment by driverdan | Hacker News Reader

As someone who used to make fake IDs it would be very easy to pass EV checks. It's like putting a padlock on a gate. Anyone who wants to get past it can easily do so.

View on HN

I have a hard time believing this. Based on my experience, a part of the EV check was checking of the business entity with the state and sending snail mail to the address of record. Since our registered address was a law firm, I had to go through all kinds of hoops to get that letter as it contained the string needed to proceed to the next step in the EV verification.

You can recruit a clueless person to be a “virtual assistant” or similar, give them some random admin tasks (to make it feel legitimate) before sending the letter to their address and asking them to read/scan the contents for you.

A similar approach is successfully used by scammers to recruit money mules.

You have to be first registered with the state and the feds (IRS) as a business which creates all kinds of legal obligations and paperwork.

You're assuming this is in the US; some countries have different requirements and it's much easier to set up a business fraudulently. Not to mention, given the current situation with fraudulent covid-related unemployment/benefit claims in the US I am pretty sure there are ways to set up a business fraudulently in the US too.

In most US states it's very easy and inexpensive to register a business.

You can create shell corporations anonymously where the only thing that ties you to the company is possession of the bearer bonds

That's messing with the taxes. That's the most dangerous kind of enterprise.

digressing a bit, that's believable but my registered agent (a specialized law firm) just scans and uploads any mail to my account on their portal. It's not a problem most businesses spend much time on but you can probably find one that lives in this century. If I'm paying them a tiny annual retainer it's the least they can do and has already saved me a lot of tax compliance hassle being able to pull old docs that were handled by someone else.

If you were deliberately trying to set up a few shells for obfuscation it would not be hard, particularly if you had some means of buying fake IDs.

That's easy with a fake ID. You can get a personal mailbox (eg UPS Store) with fake IDs and register a company on the state's website with an anonymous prepaid debit card.

This is less than a day's worth of work to setup.

Locks only keep honest people out

They also keep people honest by diminishing the temptation

Reply on news.ycombinator.com