My Indentity card has chip and pin on it with my biometrix data. Some countries have cryptograpgic signatures in them.
You think addresses are secure? They are not even real. They are not a spesific location like GPS coordinates.
They are any written text that gets mailto you. An address of 'big yellow house' can be valid. The following 'address' was delivered:
“Lives across the road from the Spar, his ma and da used to own it, his mother was Mary and da Joseph, moved to Waterfoot after he got married, plays guitar and used to run discos in the parochial hall and the hotel in the 80s. Friends with the fella who runs the butchers in Waterfoot too.”'
https://static.guim.co.uk/images/favicon-32x32.ico
Postcards with 'England' can get delivered to the right person:
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/christmas-card-addr...
Denmark has a population register ("CPR") [1], but does not have identity cards. It's required that you update your address in the register if you move house or emigrate.
Everyone also has a NemKonto ("EasyAccount"), which is a nominated bank account linked to the CPR (somehow) to receive payments from public institutions. That should make fraud of this type even more difficult.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Det_Centrale_Personregister
I have also been registered with several improtant institutions at an address that does not exist, because the telephone operator made a mistake - and the address was preposterous, they have put me in a house number 15000. So they don't check much.
Thirdly, addresses are not real. They are a myth, like simultanous events in special relativity, they do not exist in the real world but people who never had to deal with them much don't realise it.
What we call an address is a set of instructions to the postman, and if that set of instructions gets the post to your door, it is valid. Anyone paying attentions should have noticed that they often recieve post with slightly different permutations of their address. And ofcourse I have given a few silly examples. But there are genuene addresses that are unkowable. I lived in a building that spaned 3 streets, (one for each side, the last side was a house). It had 2 entances and 2 addresses.
There are addresses that are not a {street}{housenumber}, there are addresses that are a grid and no map software knows how to deal with them
And lastly there are houses that have no 'official' address! A lone hamlet near the coast might have no name at all.
So the only way to determine if an address is real, is to sent a letter, and to see if it arrives.
In the US, a lot of addressing was rationalized to support E911 service. So for example, a "camp" (i.e. a cabin without utilities) I would sometimes rent used to just have a name. But at some point it got an address on the dirt road it sits on. They also did things like change a road segment name if there was a gap between it and another segment with the same name.
I disagree, an address is trivially falsifiable compared to something like an ID or tax record (both of which the government can actually authenticate, and I'd expect/hope that financial institutions have a way to verify them that way).
The concept of a useless, trivially-falsifiable "proof of address" became a standard in the country so what the bank is doing here is merely covering their ass. As long as the entire country believes that "proof of address" is secure then they're in the clear - whether that stops any financial crime doesn't actually matter, especially when the government would rather focus on internet filters or endless gossiping about lockdown parties.
If you try and register 100s of cards to one address, they would notice. If you try and register to 100s of different addresses you can bet your backside that a majority of the residents would return to sender.
Before your address is verified your account has much more stringent fraud flags.
I imagine accounts setup to help the homeless would make poor money mules.
Sort of the inverse situation making corporate accounts hard to get in Japan. Such an account can receive large volumes of cash without raising red flags.
So here HSBC seem to be saying - if you are working with a charity (ie. have a case worker), and that charity vouches for you, then we've done the dance that makes it less of an issue for the charity to help you with an address. but you still have an address; its just the charities' address.
This is a good solution for homelessness. Its hacky, it will miss people, but it is quick.
I expect the path to getting digital nomads a verifiable address via some kind of service will be a long one; and being able to bank without an address even longer.