Yuriy Nazarenko, the creator of the underground site OnlyFake, has told me how his tool enabled North Korean fake IT workers to generate fraudulent identity documents.
OnlyFake was an online platform that allowed anyone to generate realistic photos of fake IDs using artificial intelligence. I previously reported on the site in 2024. Shortly after my article went live, Nazarenko panicked. He destroyed his laptop and emails, bought a new phone, and became convinced authorities were about to raid his home.
Nazarenko, now 28, served a year in prison. He is currently living in Asia and has been in ICE detention for months since returning from the U.S. He spoke to me to explain how his creation grew into a global network.
The manual work
Years ago, Nazarenko sat in his grandfather’s apartment in Ukraine. He worked on a diet of cigarettes, Lay’s chips, and beer. He manually created digital copies of fake identity documents. One of his four computer screens showed the messaging app Telegram. Another displayed a passport scan in Photoshop filling the entire monitor.
He edited each part of the passport pixel by pixel. Rap music played loudly in the room. He adjusted the MRZ codes, the block of text printed at the bottom of identity documents. He superimposed someone else’s face onto the photo. He also matched the overall dimensions and quirks of different passport types. Nazarenko sometimes sat for more than 12 hours at his computer. A single, high-quality fake identity document took up to a week of work.
When people think of fake IDs, they often imagine an underage teen buying a physical counterfeit driver’s licence to buy alcohol. In the global criminal underworld, digital copies or scans of IDs act like a skeleton key. A convincing scan of an ID or utility bill, loaded with a bogus name or someone else’s identity, allows criminals to open bank accounts. It lets them bypass checks on cryptocurrency exchanges to buy or sell Bitcoin. Criminals can also rent safehouses while keeping their real identity hidden. Digitally altered IDs must fool both human reviewers and automated systems that scan them for inconsistencies. Making fake IDs requires exquisite attention to detail.
All that manual labor does not scale well. Nazarenko realised this as he edited passport after passport. He created templates to speed up the process. It was still slow.
After many quiet nights, he built a website to automate the workflow. The site autopopulated a fake ID with the personal data a customer wanted, rather than requiring him to do it by hand. Later, he incorporated generative AI into the tool.
“That gradually became OnlyFake,” Nazarenko told me.
The scale of the problem
OnlyFake landed like a bomb in the fraud world. The site allowed anyone to generate convincing scans of driver’s licences or passports. It also produced realistic looking photos of those fake identity documents laying on a sofa, carpet, or desk. The images looked as if someone had taken the ID out of their wallet and snapped a picture with a phone. A convincing looking photo of a California driver’s licence opened a cryptocurrency account in someone else’s name. A British passport helped incorporate a company overseas. A Social Security card was also available. The results were photos of identity documents that did not really exist, of people who may not be real, yet they could trick the sorts of people and companies that verify documents.
With OnlyFake, you did not have to be a master forger like Nazarenko to make fake documents. Anyone could churn out fake IDs at scale, sometimes even hundreds or thousands at a time. OnlyFake threatened the entire idea of know-your-customer, or KYC, where financial institutions take steps to know who exactly are using its services. When anyone can make a photo of a fake ID for just a few dollars in Bitcoin, is anyone really who they say they are?
Nazarenko did not know it then, but OnlyFake would soon become so influential that it would spawn copy cats. The FBI eventually arrested Nazarenko and shut down some of its competitors. The Department of Justice said in an announcement about Nazarenko’s guilty plea that OnlyFake made more than a million dollars selling fake IDs for just $15 a pop.
Who used the tool
Nazarenko said North Korean fake IT workers used his creation. He also ended up in ICE detention for months after serving his sentence in the U.S. OnlyFake unleashed a new age of AI-powered fraud.
Nazarenko said he wanted to talk to me because I was the first journalist to reveal that OnlyFake existed. This article is based on interviews with Nazarenko and his lawyer; court records; and my own reporting in the online world of fraud that OnlyFake inhabited.
“OnlyFake was the first time I saw how quickly a small internet project could turn into something global. Unfortunately, it also taught me, in a very painful way, what can happen when the scale of something grows faster than your understanding of its consequences,” Nazarenko told me.
Background
Growing up, Nazarenko’s parents questioned whether he would ever find a job. His father worked for the Security Service of Ukraine. Raised in a suburb outside of Odesa, Nazarenko jumped between a few different gigs. He worked as a cook, a waiter, at a supermarket, and as a cameraman at a local Ukrainian TV station.
What it means
The shift from manual forgery to automated generation changed the nature of the crime. The barrier to entry dropped so low that criminal networks could produce thousands of documents in minutes. This directly undermines the verification processes used by banks and digital platforms. The tool demonstrated that the technology behind document verification is vulnerable when the source material can be generated at scale.
