Age and identity checks are not optional anywhere serious

You will be asked to prove who you are before you are paid anything, and there is no version of this trade on a reputable platform where you are not. This surprises people who came to the work expecting anonymity, and the two are compatible: verification is between you and the platform, not between you and buyers.

The platform that lets you skip it is not being relaxed about privacy. It is a platform that has not solved payments, has not solved liability, or does not intend to.

What you are typically asked for

Three things, sometimes a fourth.

A government photo identity document. Passport, national identity card or driving licence, photographed or scanned, all four corners visible and unedited.

A liveness check. A selfie or a short video, usually with a prompted movement, matched against the document photo. This is the step that defeats a stolen document, which is why it exists.

Payout details and a tax identifier. A bank account or payment account in your own name, plus whatever tax number your country uses. Names must match the identity document exactly, and a mismatch here is the single most common cause of a stalled first payout.

Sometimes proof of address. A utility bill or bank statement within the last three months, required more often when the platform operates under stricter financial rules or when the first two checks return something ambiguous.

Budget one to three working days for a clean submission and up to a fortnight if something needs re-doing. This is the one setup task with a lead time you cannot compress, which is why it belongs at the start of your first week rather than the end.

Why it exists

Two separate legal pressures, which is why the requirement is so consistent across platforms that otherwise agree on nothing.

Age assurance is the first. Regulators in several jurisdictions now require services carrying adult material to verify age with something stronger than a self-declared date of birth. In the UK, Ofcom's rules under the Online Safety Act 2023 have required sites and apps that allow pornography to run highly effective age checks since 25 July 2025, and comparable rules are in force or in progress elsewhere. Many platforms apply the same checks to the people supplying a service, not only to the people using it.

Financial rules are the second. A platform paying out to individuals is handling money on their behalf, which pulls it into know-your-customer and anti-money-laundering obligations set by the EU's anti-money-laundering directives and their equivalents in other countries. Its payment processor imposes the same requirement independently, and processors are considerably less flexible than platforms. Stripe's Connect documentation is typical: it says every country has Know Your Customer requirements that must be met before Stripe can pay out funds, and that it may ask for a government-issued ID, a proof of address document, or both.

The practical consequence is that verification is not a policy the platform chose and can waive for you. Asking to be exempted marks you out rather than helping you.

What happens to the documents

In most cases the platform never holds them. The check is run by a specialist identity provider, and what the platform receives back is a pass or fail plus a small set of fields - name, date of birth, document type, sometimes a reference number.

That distinction matters because it determines what a platform breach could expose. Ask, or read, which provider is used and what retention period applies to the images. Reputable providers delete document images after a defined window and keep only the result; the retention period is usually stated in a privacy notice rather than in the terms, which is why people miss it.

What buyers see is none of it. A verified badge on a listing means a check passed, not that anything about you is visible, and the separation between verified and identified is the thing new earners most often fail to notice. It is why you can hold a strong position on public anonymity while being fully verified behind it - the increments of disclosure and what each one buys treats that as a single decision, and verification sits outside it.

The wider question of how personal data behaves once it enters an automated pipeline is worth understanding as a user of these services and not only as a supplier; the account of what happens to submitted data is the general treatment.

Why an unverified platform is the risk

The absence of a check reads as convenience and is the opposite.

A platform with no verification cannot exclude minors, on either side, which is a category of exposure with no acceptable size and which becomes your problem the moment it materialises. It is also usually a platform with no proper payment relationship, which means the payout path is fragile, the hold periods are arbitrary, and there is no processor obligation standing behind your balance.

And it is a platform with nothing to lose. The verified marketplace that pays you late has a licence and a processor relationship at stake. The unverified one has neither, which is why balances there disappear in ways that have no appeal process.

If a platform's answer to "how do you verify" is vague, treat it the same way you would treat vagueness about fees - comparing platforms on take-home rather than headline commission is the same exercise applied to the money, and both questions have the same tell.

Practical handling

Photograph the document once, properly, in daylight against a plain surface, and reuse that file rather than re-shooting it each time. Keep it somewhere encrypted and out of your general photo library, which syncs to more places than you think.

Diarise the expiry date of whatever document you used. An expired identity document silently blocks payouts on some platforms, and the notification often arrives after the block rather than before.

Note the date you verified and with which provider in your business records, alongside the dated copy of the terms you agreed to - the records you will wish you kept covers why this specific line item earns its place.

Do not send documents to a buyer. Verification is a platform process, always, and a buyer requesting identity documents is either confused or attempting something; the conventions on their side - how a commission normally opens - contain nothing that would require it. The same caution applies to any request for images beyond what the format requires, and the handling conventions around submitted photographs are the reference for what is normal.

For the specific documents, provider and timeline on one marketplace, Rate Cock's judges page states what it asks for and in what order, and starting that process on day one rather than day seven is the difference between a first week that ends in a live listing and one that ends waiting.