On Wednesday, a Telegram group created by an admin under the pseudonym “Guardian M” distributed hundreds of images of individuals holding their IDs and pieces of paper written with “Binance, 02/24/19,” alleging that the data presented was hacked from the exchange.
So much for Binance's initial statement that "they all appear to be dated from February of 2018."
There are some irregularities that suggest something more complex is going on than a simple hack of Binance's database, though:
A third user we contacted could have been a victim of identity theft. The photograph we analyzed contained a face similar to the victims but incorrect address information.
An error-level analysis of the photo suggests that the some of the image had been modified, especially the brighter edges in the photo above. “Similar edges should have similar brightness in the ELA result,” wrote the photo forensics site FotoForensics. “All high-contrast edges should look similar to each other, and all low-contrast edges should look similar. With an original photo, low-contrast edges should be almost as bright as high-contrast edge.”
And Binance continues to say that the images aren't watermarked, therefore not taken from their database.
It looks like there may have been a leak of KYC data from a third party vendor they used in February 2018. That data may be mixed in with a larger set of data taken from other sources and modified.