Your name is an asset. You don't control it.
If you have an audience, your face and your handle are worth copying — and copying them is cheap, fast and largely unpunished.
Background reading, not a product claim. SCN.me is an independent private service: an SCN is not a government identifier, we are not certified under any identity scheme named here, and nothing below is legal advice or a route to complying with any law.
Four ways a name gets used without its owner.
Your likeness, endorsing something you've never seen
A cloned voice over recycled footage becomes an advert you never agreed to.
72% of Americans surveyed had already seen a fake celebrity or influencer endorsement; 39% clicked one.1 The money leaves the viewer. The reputation is yours.
A duplicate account, working your own followers
Your handle give or take a character, your photo, your bio — then messages to your audience about a prize they've won.
It costs the impersonator nothing, because they inherit an audience that already trusts the name.
A sponsorship offer that takes the account
A plausible brand approach, a “creative brief” attachment, and malware that lifts the session token.2
Two-factor authentication does not stop this. A stolen session is already logged in, and recovering it is between you and the platform. What a number can do is stop vouching: mark that one account as unverified while you fight for it, without touching your number or the rest of your profiles.
The code you scan isn't the payee
In much of the world a QR code is simply how you pay. It is also the easiest thing in the room to swap: a sticker over the real code routes the money somewhere else, and the square itself tells you nothing.4
A number resolves to someone, or it does not. Nearly $1B was reported lost to business impersonators last year, and another ~$920M to fake government agencies.
A badge only works where you rent it.
Platforms sell the verified badge by the month. The problem isn't the price — it's the shape: billed per account and per platform, so several presences means several bills for the same fact about one person.
And it stops at the platform edge. A mark inside one company's walls can only vouch for you inside those walls, for as long as the billing continues.
Our own position, plainly: registration is free, and a subscription is planned for features beyond the number itself — not for the number, and not for being verified. Nothing you pay us changes what your record says about you.
The law is starting to ask.
Governments on both sides of the Atlantic are writing identity and age checks into ordinary online life — in the US mostly per site, in Europe as a portable credential you carry between services.6,7
The detail changes often and we're not the right people to summarise it — the sources are. SCN plays no part in these schemes and is not a way to comply with them.
Being precise about our own claims.
We would rather understate this than oversell it. The argument for SCN is that a number you own, and that people vouch for, is useful — not that it discharges anyone's legal duties.
Figures are quoted as reported by the named source on the date given, and are not independently verified by SCN.me. Corrections: contact us.
A number you own, and people who vouch for it.
Registration is free. The app is in closed beta.