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Ask HN: Would you send a photo holding your drivers license to rent a VPS?

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Ask HN: Would you send a photo holding your drivers license to rent a VPS?

#31

Post by lolinder »

pants2 wrote: post #2

AFAIK there's a new law requiring KYC for IaaS providers serving the US. I'm assuming it covers their butts as well regarding malicious activity, they don't want to host a DoS attack, CP site, or similar. You might be hard pressed to find a hosting provider in the US that doesn't ask for these things.

This is probably what you're thinking of [0]. The comments period is closed, but as far as I know it hasn't actually become a rule yet, and regardless:

* The rule would only apply to people living outside the US, so if you pay with a credit card with a billing address in the US from an IP in the US they probably wouldn't need to KYC you.

* KYC != "send me a photo of you holding your driver's license". I can open a bank account by just typing in my name, address, birthday, and SSN. That's enough KYC for a bank, it would be more than enough for a hosting provider even if that proposed rule became law.

What this company is asking for is beyond the pale even by full finance KYC standards. The most likely explanation is that an automated fraud detection system got set off and OP was selected for a much more rigorous review than they typically do.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40158752

Re: Ask HN: Would you send a photo holding your drivers license to rent a VPS?

#33

Post by Terr_ »

theturtletalks wrote: post #18
codetrotter wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we should insist that KYC be solely performed by banks That sounds like a great way of preventing anyone who doesn’t have a bank account from being able to use services at all. There are ~1.7 Billion people in the world that are unbanked. Even in the US alone there are around 55 million unbanked adults. (2018 numbers) I think we should push for the opposite. Less KYC all around.

KYC is actually a clever trick by the government to pass the buck to the banks to verify if transactions are illegal or not. The main reason is that when you are dealing with the government, you are innocent until proven guilty. Using the banks to money launder? It’s up to the government to prove it and bring charges or its business as usual for you. With banks having that power, you’re guilty until you prove innocen…

Are you similarly against KYC rules when it comes to people trying to exchange scrap bundles of copper wire they "found lying around" into cash?

There's always room for reform, but it's not as if the concept of due-diligence was invented just recently for banking alone.

Re: Ask HN: Would you send a photo holding your drivers license to rent a VPS?

#35

Post by jimmydorry »

chatmasta wrote: post #16

Blur everything but your name and photo and then unblur pieces of it until they accept it. Also make sure to watermark it with repeating 10px red text saying “only for purposes of ID verification with OVH.”

Places that require this level of identification will generally insist on no watermark or edits. If this is the make-or-break for you, you will end up not proceeding and having given away your ID for naught.

Re: Ask HN: Would you send a photo holding your drivers license to rent a VPS?

#36

Post by tiffanyh »

Three ways of looking at this:

1. Maybe something about you is triggering their fraud system for step-up verification.

2. They might experience a lot of fraudulent (scammer) users, which is a net-negative for anyone who host there because ISP might black list that hosting providers IPs.

3. Maybe they are super serious and KYC all onboarding because they only what super vetted customers because that benefits everyone to have a “clean network” (basically the opposite of #2).

Given OVH super low pricing, my guess is #2.

Re: Ask HN: Would you send a photo holding your drivers license to rent a VPS?

#37

Post by perihelions »

pelagicAustral wrote: post #24

Why OVH? I've had awful experience using their services... Vultr, Linode, UpCloud, Hetzner are far better options... none of them require this nonsense.

Hetzner has asked some HN'ers for passport scans [0], and in my case, they asked me to consent to a video scan of my face, with some of ersatz machine vision [1]. Their loss.

[0] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=hetzner%20passport&type=commen...

[1] https://www.idenfy.com/identity-verification-service/

Re: Ask HN: Would you send a photo holding your drivers license to rent a VPS?

#38

Post by Repulsion9513 »

gpm wrote: post #26

Yes. Ultimately the internet is a lawless extremely low trust place, because it isn't limited by borders, so there is no effective law enforcement over a significant fraction of the people on it. Hosting providers bear a fair bit of the brunt of this because they're a staging ground for doing actually evil things. I want to work with high trust places. I don't want an IP address that was just being used to hack peopl…

> I want to work with high trust places. I don't want an IP address that was just being used to hack people

Then don't use OVH :)

Re: Ask HN: Would you send a photo holding your drivers license to rent a VPS?

#39

Post by kevinsync »

10 years ago I registered a dot-ru and let’s just say the requirements were quite overreaching LOL. I’m embarrassed to admit to the documentation I provided to make it happen. My identity has probably been sold a thousand times by now ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Re: Ask HN: Would you send a photo holding your drivers license to rent a VPS?

#40

Post by gpm »

Repulsion9513 wrote: post #38
gpm wrote: post #26

Yes. Ultimately the internet is a lawless extremely low trust place, because it isn't limited by borders, so there is no effective law enforcement over a significant fraction of the people on it. Hosting providers bear a fair bit of the brunt of this because they're a staging ground for doing actually evil things. I want to work with high trust places. I don't want an IP address that was just being used to hack peopl…

> I want to work with high trust places. I don't want an IP address that was just being used to hack people Then don't use OVH :)

Maybe, I don't have any real opinions on them, but wherever they are this is a step in the right direction with regards to that.
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