OnlyFake Creator Yuriy Nazarenko on How Generative AI Turned Pixel-by-Pixel Forgeries into a Mass Fraud Factory
Ukrainian Yuriy Nazarenko manually forged passports pixel by pixel in his grandfather’s apartment, taking a week per document. He first built a website to automate template filling, then integrated generative AI as it became mainstream, allowing OnlyFake to let anyone obtain fake ID photos for $15 that could bypass both human review and automated systems. He admits the scale of growth far outstripped his understanding of the consequences, leading to his eventual arrest by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), a one-year prison sentence, and several months of detention by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Yuriy Nazarenko lived off cigarettes, chips, and beer in his grandfather’s apartment on the outskirts of Odesa, Ukraine, forging passports pixel by pixel across four screens. One screen displayed Telegram, while another showed a passport scan filling the entire monitor in Photoshop. He edited MRZ codes, superimposed other people’s faces, and adjusted the dimensions and printing characteristics of each passport type. A high-quality fake document took a week to craft, and he would sometimes sit at his computer for more than twelve hours straight.
This manual craftsmanship did not scale. Nazarenko created templates to speed up the process, but bottlenecks remained. His next step was building a website that allowed customers to input personal information, which would then automatically populate the fake ID templates. Later, when generative AI became mainstream, he integrated it as well. OnlyFake thus came into existence.
OnlyFake produced more than just scans of documents; it generated realistic-looking photos simulating real-world shooting scenarios—fake IDs lying on sofas, carpets, or desks, as if someone had taken them out of their wallet and snapped a picture with their phone. Need a photo of a California driver’s license to open a cryptocurrency account? A British passport to register a company overseas? A Social Security card? All were available. The result was photos of non-existent people and non-existent documents that could still deceive verification personnel and automated scanning systems.