Marketplace Trust & Safety
Marketplaces and platforms face a unique challenge: you need to verify both sides of a transaction — sellers, service providers, landlords, drivers, or any user who interacts with others on your platform. Verifa gives you the tools to verify identities, screen against watchlists, detect duplicates, and build trust across your platform.
Common marketplace verification scenarios
Watchlist screening, risk assessment, and identity cross-reference run automatically on every session — you don’t need to add them.
Implementation
Verify a seller at onboarding
cURL
Python
JavaScript
Always include an external_ref (your internal user ID) when creating sessions.
Verifa automatically creates an identity record when the session completes,
linking the verified data to that reference. This enables duplicate detection,
re-verification, and continuous monitoring.
Preventing duplicate accounts
Fraudulent sellers often create multiple accounts after being banned. Add Duplicate Detection to your workflow to catch this. It compares:
- Device fingerprint — Same browser or device
- Face embedding — Same person, different name
- Document number — Same ID document
- Email / phone — Reused contact details
When a duplicate is detected, the session is routed to manual review.
Custom blocklists
Maintain a list of banned users and match new signups against it. Add List Check to your workflow to enable matching.
Recommended workflow: seller onboarding
Build this workflow in the dashboard using the visual workflow builder:
Watchlist screening and risk assessment run automatically on top of this. Use conditional nodes to route high-risk sessions to manual review.
See the Creating a Workflow tutorial for a step-by-step walkthrough.
Embedding verification in your platform
Use verifa.js to verify users without leaving your marketplace:
Trust signals for your users
Once a seller or provider is verified, display trust indicators:
- Verified badge — Show that the user has completed identity verification
- Verification date — When they were last verified
- Screening status — Confirm they passed AML screening
Retrieve this from the identity record (automatically created when the session completed):
Platform-specific considerations
Multi-sided verification
Create different workflows for different user types. Use the metadata field to
tag the user type, then use different workflow_id values:
wf_seller_onboarding— Full verification with AML + duplicate detectionwf_buyer_verification— Lighter check with document + face match onlywf_provider_verification— Full verification + address + phone risk
Re-verification
For periodic re-verification or when suspicious activity is detected, create a
new session with the same external_ref. Verifa links it to the existing
identity automatically:
International platforms
Verifa supports documents from 100+ countries. Set the country field to
optimize OCR accuracy, or omit it to let Verifa auto-detect the document origin.
Webhook-driven activation
Use webhooks to automatically activate or flag accounts:
Related
- Tutorial: Creating a Workflow — Build a workflow step by step
- Quickstart — Create your first session in 5 minutes
- Identities — How identity records work
- Lists — Custom blocklists for banned users
- Fraud Signals — 150+ signals for fraud detection
- Webhooks Guide — Automate account activation
- JavaScript SDK — Embed verification in your UI