This is the year it all changes
Chloe Coleman
When the Online Safety Act went live in 2025, the web was filled with teens boasting that they’d managed to defeat the checks in various inventive ways.
That was just to get onto porn websites. Imagine if there was real money at stake.
The latest generation of AI models and agents make it easy for any determined person to make convincing-looking fake documents, fool biometrics or even lay plausible traces of a completely made-up identity around the internet.
For the first time, fraudsters can also automate the whole thing and run it at high frequency.
Sophisticated multi-million pound systems built over decades are being defeated by bored children in minutes.
It’s not because the people who think up these systems aren’t clever. Nor is it because the people who break them are particularly smart. It’s certainly not because there’s a flaw in the algorithms.
It’s because all today’s ID verification systems share a common vulnerability; the user and the attacker are the same person.
The age of purely visual document checks is over. They were built for a world where documents were hard to fake and attackers operated at human speed. That world has gone.
We need to replace them with digital evidence that can be verified independently rather than judged by eye.
That shift changes the whole purpose of identity verification, and it is a genuinely positive one. It offers a path to lower fraud, less friction for genuine customers, and systems that are more resilient and more humane by design.
This is the foreword to Digital ID in the UK, our new guide for compliance and fraud leaders on the changes coming this year.
We’re launching the guide at our event on 5 Feb. You can still join the waitlist.
