Comment by Etheryte
4 months ago
In many countries worldwide that's the reasonable best option. A scan of a physically signed piece of paper is no better, anyone could've signed it. So long as there is no global standard for digitally signed documents, that's what we're stuck with, no?
While you can always outright commit fraud, there are many jurisdictions where there are decently strong forms of proof that go beyond a letter.
Things like tax numbers with addresses associated to them, official address registers... hell, a lot of ID cards in many jurisdictions just have your address printed on it!
Now, again, fraud is possible, but "I registered my drivers license to a fake address" is a bit of a higher hurdle than "I edited my utility PDF to show the right address".
Though there's a bit of a blessing in things like PDFs being easily editable, in that many badly organized criminals will likely do it haphazardly, leading to messy metadata, or even more amateur hour stuff around just having the font be wrong or the like. More opportunities for a fraudster to trip up, so to speak.
In countries where you do have e.g. tax numbers associated with addresses no government agency is going to give it to a random private company. I've lived in many countries both in the EU and outside of it and I can think of only a few countries where you actually could do something better than a pdf — and they use digital signatures.
A bank is not a random private company.
In Finland, people are supposed to have a single official address. When you move, the government informs banks and other businesses that have a legitimate reason to know your official address, unless you have opted out. There are a few exceptions, such as temporary addresses and international relocations, where you have to give the new address yourself.
I don't know about the rest of the EU but France just has national ID cards with your address printed on the back! No need for anything fancy there.
In both Australia and Japan there are tax numbers used for corporate identity verification (remember: here we're talking about a Wise account used for a business)
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> In countries where you do have e.g. tax numbers associated with addresses no government agency is going to give it to a random private company.
Why not? In my country the company registry is public, anyone can pay a small fee to get an official certificate of a company's address and company number.
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Does it necessarily need to be a global standard? Just starting with the ones that do have a digital signature infrastructure would be something. The EU has eIDAS, which already covers 27 countries, for example.