Yurii Nazarenko was 22 years old when he started selling fake passports online for $15 each back in 2020.
By the time the FBI caught up with him, his notorious website OnlyFake had produced at least 10,000 fake identification documents and pulled in $1.2 million in cryptocurrency.
On February 26, Nazarenko pleaded guilty in a Manhattan federal courtroom to running the operation from roughly 2021 to 2024. He faces up to 15 years in prison and has agreed to forfeit $1.2 million in crypto proceeds.
The Notorious Only Fake Site Changed The Rules
Nazarenko rose to notoriety after his site, Only Fake, was featured in 404 Media in 2024. What caught their attention was that he claimed he was using Neural Networks that could create thousands of identities a day.
He sold his fake Digital IDs for $15.
For bulk buyers, Nazarenko offered volume discounts on packages of up to 1,000 fake IDs. He claimed the system could batch-generate documents from a spreadsheet, producing up to 20,000 per day.
His website showing Generator 3.0 is still up and running, but Yurii probably won’t be able to deliver because he’s locked up.
Maybe the FBI is leaving it up and running so they can catch people trying to order Fake ID’s for their fraud schemes.
The Fast Food Menu Model – 10,000 Served
Only Fake worked like a drive-through restaurant, offering buyers fake Digital IDs for cheap that they could get in seconds.
Customers picked a document type from a dropdown menu, entered the name and address they wanted, uploaded a photo, and received a finished fake ID in under a minute.
The site covered driver’s licenses from all 50 U.S. states and passports from about 56 different countries. The output looked like a casual snapshot of a real ID sitting on a kitchen counter or a someones bed. It is exactly the kind of image that banks and crypto exchanges accept when someone opens an account online.
Investigators put a screenshot in the indictment of how buyers could enter their information.
The FBI Bought 5 ID’s From Him – Then Took Him Down
Maybe his fame was his undoing. The FBI caught wind of Nazerenko after investigative reporter Joseph Cox at 404 Media bought a fake British passport from the site in February 2024 and used it to pass identity checks at crypto exchange OKX on the first try. That story blew the operation wide open.
Between May and June 2024, undercover FBI agents purchased five separate fake documents from OnlyFake: a New York state ID card, a U.S. passport card, a New York driver’s license, a U.S. passport, and a Social Security card.
Every single fake identity card was delivered as advertised. According to the indictment, an OnlyFake customer service rep even gave an undercover agent tips on how to use the fakes to get past identity checks at crypto exchanges.
The Disclaimer That Fooled No One
Like all these online criminals, Nazreneko hid behind a dumb disclaimer he thought would protect him legally.
OnlyFake included a disclaimer saying its products could only be used “as a joke for friends.”
Federal prosecutors were not impressed. The indictment notes that Nazarenko knew his fakes were being sold in bulk to people on forums commonly used for criminal activity.
He Exposed A Hole
Nazerenko may be behind bars, but the cat is out of the bag. What once required a skilled forger with specialized equipment can now be done by anyone with $15 and a crypto wallet.
Resistant AI found that OnlyFake-style services have already multiplied across the internet, with several existing operations maintaining larger template databases and higher traffic than OnlyFake ever had. One guilty plea is not going to close this door.
Read The Indictment
You can read everything here.
