Because if a checkmark costs $1/month for example, then spending a couple grand to be able to turn any story you want into "trending" is chump change for corporations, governments, and any particularly motivated silicon-valley salary'd employee.
There are already services which essentially sell you retweets - all this is is an adjustment to their business model to sell "verified retweets" and "aged verified retweets" (in case you want accounts with a posting history to do it).
It's a cost model adjustment, that might not even cost that much - after all if "verified" accounts receive less scrutiny from anti-bot algorithms, then they'd be cheaper to run then the developers/workers who need to keep your sockpuppet farm ahead of the game.
Get a face from a thispersondoesnotexist.com like generator. Get the format of the ID in a template, fill in random but realistic data. Like for example, 1000 names for each race-gender combo. Realistic zip codes and addresses from another source.
It’s about a weeks work to get it working to production quality, but it can be easily done.
For bonus credit, see if you can generate an image of the same person holding up this ID. Harder, but not impossible.
What’s frustrating is, those of us who work or have worked in Integrity have already discussed all of this for years. We know the easy solutions, the low hanging fruit. It’s not that helpful when a bunch of people say “why don’t you just charge $2 a month”
Non-government actors can get in on the action by procuring IDs in other ways ("Make money by scanning your late maw-maws ID"[1]), or large scale phishing campaigns (fake jobs or college admissions abroad with 100% applicant success rate, the only catch is scanned IDs and qualifications are required).
Electronic forgeries are likely the best way to do it at scale; just the other day, therr was a top story ok faking as if your document was scanned. Do the fine people handling verifications at Twitter know what a legit Madagascan ID looks like?
1. Or "Get $10,000 funeral assistance from this new Biden admin relief program"
> Do the people at Twitter know what a legit Madagascan ID looks like?
Yes, there are guides for checking ID cards, how do you think that they check ID cards in real life?
Oh no, I've broken the ID forgery laws of Burkina Faso and am in big trouble now. Isn't it a rule of low-level scamming to always target jurisdictions away from your own? State-actors don't care about commiting crimes against themselves, only the mid-level, "semi-pro" threat actors care about avoiding major crimes.
Is that assumption correct? It seems incredibly wrong to me, but I may be misinformed.
Those are also not really the problem.