The US has nabbed the man behind an underground website that used AI to help customers create fake, but realistic-looking digital versions of government IDs.
A 27-year-old Ukrainian national named Yurii Nazarenko pleaded guilty to fraud charges for running the “OnlyFake” website, the Justice Department (DOJ) announced today. He produced and sold over 10,000 fake IDs, earning hundreds of thousands of dollars in cryptocurrency.
“For example, OnlyFake allowed its customers to generate fake US identification documents, including digital versions of driver’s licenses for each of the fifty states, United States passports, United States passport cards, and Social Security cards,” the DOJ says.
(Credit: DOJ)
The site helped people bypass systems that require digital copies of government-issued IDs to verify identity. Banks and cryptocurrency exchanges, for example, require ID to open new accounts; OnlyFake IDs let people do that while concealing their real identities to launder money.
On OnlyFake, buyers could “customize the type of Digital Fake ID they wanted, including whether the Digital Fake ID should appear to be a scan of a real identification document, or appear to be a photograph of a real identification document taken on a surface like a table,” the DOJ says.
According to a previously sealed indictment, Nazarenko ran OnlyFake since at least 2021, and the site also produced digital passports for 56 other countries outside the US. He was indicted in November 2024 and arrested almost a year later.
The indictment suggests investigators were tracking the crypto payments; it says Nazarenko transferred money made from OnlyFake through several crypto wallets to conceal where it came from. In August 2024, meanwhile, OnlyFake customer support advised an undercover law enforcement agent on how to use a fake ID to bypass crypto exchange registration requirements.
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In February 2024, 404Media covered OnlyFake and found the site could create “a highly convincing California driver’s license, complete with whatever arbitrary name, biographical information, address, expiration date, and signature we wanted.” OnlyFake created a photo of the fake driver’s license that appeared to have been snapped with a smartphone camera, and the resulting image successfully passed verification at the cryptocurrency exchange OKX.
(Credit: Internet Archive/OnlyFake)
OnlyFake highlights how generative AI can fuel cybercrime; other hackers have been using AI voice cloning and AI-generated videos to impersonate people or phish potential victims.
The case against Nazarenko is among the first-ever charges for digital fake IDs, the DOJ says. He faces up to 15 years in prison and will forfeit $1.2 million in OnlyFake proceeds.
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I’ve been a journalist for over 15 years. I got my start as a schools and cities reporter in Kansas City and joined PCMag in 2017, where I cover satellite internet services, cybersecurity, PC hardware, and more. I’m currently based in San Francisco, but previously spent over five years in China, covering the country’s technology sector.
Since 2020, I’ve covered the launch and explosive growth of SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet service, writing 600+ stories on availability and feature launches, but also the regulatory battles over the expansion of satellite constellations, fights with rival providers like AST SpaceMobile and Amazon, and the effort to expand into satellite-based mobile service. I’ve combed through FCC filings for the latest news and driven to remote corners of California to test Starlink’s cellular service.
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