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Home office during quarantine: how to figure out which online services to trust with ID verification

Countries around the world try to combat the coronavirus outbreak and hence announce quarantine for everyone which is forcing people to set up home offices. Therefore many people have to use online services for their everyday needs: shopping, money transfers, etc. And of course, many of these services require identity verification. How to choose an online service that you can trust documents and personal data with?

Where ID verification is important

First of all, not every online service needs your full personal data e.g. photo of the passport/ID card, selfie, credit card information. If an online delivery app asks for your passport data then you might want to download another one, because you definitely do not need to provide this sensitive information to get your groceries delivered to your door.

So which services certainly need your data?

Money transferring services

Coronavirus economy made people send and receive money online more often. Moreover, those who previously got paid in cash in the office probably would need to get money transferring apps. So is it normal if a money transferring app asks you to provide a photo of the passport or take a selfie? Yes, absolutely. It’s made to avoid money laundering, to provide tax authorities information about big money transfers which probably haven’t been taxed etc. So basically it is just the compliance with anti-money laundering regulations that exist in every single country.

Healthcare services

Healthcare services are also often used by fraudsters to buy prescription drugs or use the health insurance of the other person. That is why all that kind of services have complicated KYC procedures to be sure about the patient’s identity.

Health services need to realize a patient’s personality to get to important clinical and treatment narratives and guarantee that they are giving the right diagnosis. Patients additionally need documentation to demonstrate enlistment in insurance companies that cover clinical costs. Administration of the services needs a one of a kind patient identifier to have the access to total records of any healthcare databases to create statistics and other information for assessment, crisis reaction, and improved treatments and disease management.

Insurance services

Insurance companies, like money transfer apps, are also concerned about things like money laundering, tax evasion, terrorist financing, political influence peddling, and fraud in general.

There is any range of criminal/fraudulent schemes available and those services have to be certain that whatever they’re involved in is legal and above board. The first step is ensuring that they understand who their customers are, what they’re doing, and why they are doing it. That is why insurance services might also require a lot of personal data and photos of the documents, as well as some biometric data (selfie for instance). That is perfectly normal.

Education

Most of the universities are closed due to COVID-19 as well, so students are also doing “remote job” studying. However, most of the university probably will not ask the students for serious ID verification. The only thing students need to provide is the number in university intranet (e.g. Neptun) or the student card number.

GetID Faceselfie photo

What makes ID verification service safe

Safe identity verification uses facial recognition. It compares the user’s identity document data with the user’s real-life identity. There are AI facial ID recognition solutions which are used by many KYC-providers, which match biometrics with artificial intelligence and machine learning to offer precise and accurate user identification (for instance, GetID, Onfido and etc.)

Biometrics arrangements can be included into any of these means to add to the security of the character check process (eye-examining innovation, voice recognition, fingerprints, etc).

ID verification, in the end, can help employers to pay salary to the right person and be sure that all the employees, even contractors, have paid the taxes.

Also, proper ID verification can help companies with high-security levels make sure that the sensitive and secret data is accessible to only employers even if they work from personal computers from home.

Which KYC procedure or service can be trusted?

First of all, the one who requires a physical person in the verification process to access the data. It might be face recognition or another scanning. It is called liveness detection.

Secondly, it is the service who uses your digital ID which might comply with other services you are already using to verify your identity.

Do not trust the services which do not even ask two-factor authentication, which means that your sensitive personal data can be accessed only with a password, for instance.

This is a hard time for the whole human being. People need to be socially responsible and stay at home. Therefore, everybody should know how to trust your personal data and ID to online services. Share this article with your friends and stay safe!