If you’ve created a Porkbun account to register a domain name recently, you may have been prompted to complete photo ID verification when signing up and wondered why that was required. This is a targeted part of our ongoing efforts to ensure that Porkbun’s services are used responsibly as well as comply with ICANN and other contractual obligations that require every account has correct and verifiable contact information.

Fraud, abuse, and other misuse results in a domino effect of legal action, support cases, operational and reputational damage, and spiraling costs. We believe the most efficient way to keep our prices low and our product-quality high is to prevent bad actors from registering domains in the first place.

In our years of operation, we’ve previously taken a number of steps short of ID verification to prevent abuse and continue to employ numerous strategies. Despite this, we’ve still seen an increasing volume of abuse at Porkbun, leading us to identify geographic regions and other signals where ID verification can be used to help combat potential abuse. After much serious consideration of how to effectively confront this and taking our customer’s privacy into account, we have made the decision to require photo ID verification for a subset of new Porkbun accounts.

Securing Your Data

To ensure we reliably verify IDs from around the world and protect our customers’ data, we are partnering with Veriff ID verification service. Veriff publishes their full customer data compliance structure, which meets GDPR and SOC 2 standards among others. You can read more about how data security is handled in the Veriff trust center.

To make sure the Porkbun ID verification process is secure on our end, we do not retain any ID photographs or ID information. We do not associate any of this process with your account other than that you passed via Veriff ID verification.

Why Is Porkbun ID Verification Important?

In a time when more people are more dependent on internet technology than ever before, it is critical that we do our part at Porkbun to contribute to a safer internet environment. By proactively addressing domain abuse and fraud, while still providing good value for our customers, we seek to set a standard that helps achieve these goals.

It’s our highest priority that Porkbun maintains a reputation as an ethical, trustworthy and responsible domain registrar and provider of hosting services. Reputation is at the core of our operations, so preventing misuse of our services is fundamental to all of our goals.