Can I be scammed by sending a photo of my ID?

Identity documents — passports, driving licences, national ID cards — contain enough information to impersonate you in financial and government systems. Scammers posing as landlords, employers, lenders, or marketplace buyers routinely request ID photos as a seeming legitimacy check, then use them to open bank accounts, apply for credit, register SIM cards, or sell your details on criminal marketplaces. You should share ID photos only through verified, encrypted channels with regulated businesses that have a legal obligation to protect your data. If you have already shared ID with an unknown party, consider placing a fraud alert on your credit file and monitoring your accounts closely.

Context determines whether an ID request is reasonable. Banks, employers completing right-to-work checks, letting agents running referencing, and regulated platforms performing know-your-customer verification all have lawful reasons to see identification — and they collect it through secure portals with stated retention policies, not through chat apps. The suspicious pattern is an ID request that arrives early, through an informal channel, from a party whose own identity you cannot verify, especially when it is framed as proving you are 'serious' about a deal.

When sharing is genuinely necessary, you can still reduce the blast radius. Ask how the document will be stored and when it will be deleted, send it through the organisation's official upload system rather than email where possible, and consider a visible watermark stating the purpose and date across the image. None of this eliminates risk, but it makes your document far less attractive for reuse.