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I was wondering if anyone has ideas about how to cheaply and effectively verify the user's first name,last name and possibly zipcode ( not required).I am not familiar with 3rd party services... I looked at experian and they seem to have one based on credit cards which is the only way I can think of. I could not get an idea of how much this costs though....have you used them?

thanks for any suggestions!

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Just wanted to clarify...has anyone used credit card info that a user chooses to disclose to verify identity. If so, how? Thanks! – Madhavi Sep 6 '10 at 20:37
Country associated with the card and real name. I don't think you can get much else, though. – Elie Sep 7 '10 at 0:33

2 Answers

Simple way: NOT AT ALL. Point. No way to do what you want.

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One way we're doing this is for users who want to get verified on our site is to request that they send us a photocopy of government issued documentation (passport, drivers license) along with information from their account on the site. If the information matches, then we can mark that user as validated.

We haven't been able to automate it, though. Anyone can lie about this, but the manual process is pretty accurate. Fortunately, we only handle a few dozen of these at a time.

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Thanks Elie..I hadn't thought of that. – Madhavi Sep 6 '10 at 20:37

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