Credit Ratings

Regarding OggNasty's comment and others on GLBSE verification.

Firstly I'd LOVE to hand it off to a third party(it's rather a time consuming process), it's not something that I think GLBSE should be doing but no one else is offering to do it so....we do.

Regarding Oggs comments on how useful verification is, with each element that is verified the risk that the person is not who they say they are goes down.

We don't just accept ID's for ID verification, we also require that a picture of the person be sent as well to compare (so that stolen ID's cannot be used), we only accept certain types of ID making the job easier for us.

Add in Facebook and linked-In verification which reduces risk further, we check the accounts to ensure that they are genuine, and if pics are present we compare to photo ID as well. This isn't a process that cannot be fooled but with each step it gets more difficult.

On the phone verification front Google voice actually tells the caller that it's a GV number and is being forwarded, we don't accept GV or any number forwarding service (if we know it is one).

For address verification, we don't send mail, we use another method.

Often when an issuer gets fully verified they also send us extra documents and other information, added to that we scour the web for the person to determine if they have an existing online reputation and save those details too.

Each verification takes about 1- 1&1/2 hours of work.

As I said it's not fool proof or guaranteed, but is a risk reducing measure, it reduces the risk of this person not so much being a scammer but of pretending to be someone they're not. One that I'd be happy to hand off to another organisation that would do this.