Buyer and seller identity verification for high-value transactions
Document capture, liveness, face match, and mDL. Signed webhook returns a verified identity assertion.
Capabilities
Identity verification at the vehicle-marketplace transaction boundary
Buyer and seller identity at registration
Government-issued ID captured in-session for both buyer and seller at signup. OCR plus barcode cross-reference returns the credential's issuing state and a signed identity assertion the marketplace's onboarding system stores as the user's identity primary key. Same primitive on each side — the marketplace's matching logic gets a verified identity on both ends of the transaction.
Liveness + face match against the document portrait
Selfie captured in-session, matched against the document portrait under passive liveness scoring. Defeats the most common identity-laundering pattern in vehicle marketplaces: stolen credentials uploaded by a different person, then used to list or bid on high-value vehicles. Sub-second result, no UX detour.
Re-verification at high-value-transaction trigger
Marketplaces can require a fresh Stile session at a configurable transaction-value threshold. Most operators trigger at $25k+ where the fraud-loss exposure justifies the friction. The fresh assertion is chained to the user's onboarding audit pointer so the marketplace can tell at-a-glance whether the same human is on both ends of the chain.
How a marketplace verification flows
Configurable per platform. The default is at registration; some operators trigger additional verifications at first-listing, first-bid, or high-value-transaction thresholds.
- Step 01
1. Trigger
Platform invokes Stile when the buyer or seller reaches the verification step in onboarding, or at a configured transaction milestone (first listing, first bid, high-value threshold).
- Step 02
2. Capture
Government ID (driver's license, state ID, or US-issued mDL) captured in-session. Selfie capture in the same session for liveness + face match. The user explicitly approves attribute release before any data leaves their device.
- Step 03
3. Verify
OCR + barcode cross-reference resolves the credential's issuing state and document number; ISO/IEC 18013-5 signature verification for mDL. Liveness scoring + face match against the document portrait. Spoof signals weighed into the eligibility decision.
- Step 04
4. Signed assertion
Signed webhook fires with the eligibility decision, jurisdiction, and audit pointer. The full identity assertion (legal name, DOB hash, document-number hash, jurisdiction) is reachable via the verification-result API for the marketplace's onboarding system to consume.
Transaction scenarios + Stile coverage
The verification scenarios vehicle marketplaces most commonly trigger Stile against. Each scenario is configured independently — different trigger surface, different threshold, different release attribute set.
| Transaction scenario | What Stile verifies | Audit-trail shape |
|---|---|---|
| Buyer registration on the platform | Government ID + liveness + face match | Per-buyer identity primary key for the marketplace's user record |
| Seller registration on the platform | Government ID + liveness + face match | Per-seller identity primary key for the marketplace's user record |
| First listing of a high-value vehicle | Fresh session against the seller's prior identity | Listing-specific audit pointer chained to the seller's onboarding record |
| Buyer at high-value-transaction threshold | Fresh session at platform-configured value threshold | Transaction-specific audit pointer for the marketplace's fraud log |
| Re-verification after suspension lift | Fresh session against the claimed identity | Audit pointer linked to the suspension record + the new active-user record |
| Periodic re-verification (per platform policy) | Fresh session at the configured cadence | Updated assertion + chained audit pointer |
Vehicle marketplaces sit at the boundary between buyers and sellers in transactions that frequently clear five figures. The identity-verification step is the marketplace's first defence against title-fraud, identity-laundering, and synthetic-identity buyers. Stile contributes the verification primitive; the marketplace's separate sources — vehicle-history reports, title-status checks, escrow handling — combine with the identity primitive to produce the full transaction record. Related coverage:
Identity verification — the underlying identity-attribute case for buyer and seller onboarding.
Digital ID verification — mDL deep dive. mDL acceptance for vehicle marketplaces is per-platform-policy; most platforms accept either physical credential or mDL, with the underlying signed assertion shape identical across both.
Automotive — sibling vertical (dealer fraud reduction).
FAQ
Vehicle marketplace verification — buyer questions
No. Stile produces the identity-of-record assertion for the human on each side of a transaction. Vehicle-history reports, title-status, lien checks, and odometer audits run on separate data sources the marketplace's compliance team already consumes. Stile contributes the identity primitive — that the human listing or buying the vehicle is who they claim to be. The two layers join platform-side via the verification-result audit pointer keyed against the marketplace's user record.
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