>but at least in my experience, when opening a bank account in person, they do diligent checks Most banks don't even have UV lights, not that fake IDs don't us

>but at least in my experience, when opening a bank account in person, they do diligent checks Most banks don't even have UV lights, not that fake IDs don't usually have decent UV markings anyway. Hardly very diligent. >for non-German cards they even have a database how different nations' ID cards should look like and what the security markings are. As do essentially all banks in the world, doesn't save you though. Many European IDs (Romanian, Greek for example) do not have any meaningful security features, Romanian IDs can look completely different depending on which day and which city they're printed in and there's no reference guide for this. Even a good enough German fake won't cost much https://telegra.ph/ID-Cloning-Only-12-17 https://telegra.ph/ID-Cloning-Only-12-17 The hologram isn't perfect, but that'll work at any bank. >Video-Ident aka holding your ID card into your webcam is indeed vulnerable, and banks like N26 got in really hot water, which forced them to ramp up their anti-fraud measures to a degree even legitimate customers got massively impacted [1]. Pretty much any fake ID that'll pass Video-Ident will generally work at the bank too. >The classic scams are the majority, and yet even these they yield the scammers only something like 13 million euros a year [2], that's laughable compared to the amount Americans lose, even if one assumes that only a tenth of the cases gets reported at all. This is totally wrong, there are individual people running car-selling scams on mobile.de netting more than that. >And again: entire classes of scams like "I got arrested and need bail money" or "I was involved in a traffic accident and need to pay the hospital cash advance for treatment" don't work here because we don't have cash bail or bills from hospitals and people know that. If you would try this scam on any European, they'd laugh you off because they know that this doesn't exist. Those scams are common in the US and UK, but they only make up a small part of the $ losses. The bulk of the losses comes in the form of people losing all of their savings as their bank account is emptied.