How We Verify Waste Carriers on RubbishBids

Why We Made Registration Harder

A marketplace that connects householders with carriers is only worth using if the carriers on it are real. We've written before about catching rogue carriers after the fact — but catching a problem is worse than preventing one. So we rebuilt the signup process from the ground up, deliberately biased toward blocking a scammer even if it means a small amount of extra friction for a genuine carrier.

The result is a longer application than most marketplaces ask for. It costs us signups. We think that's the right trade: every customer posting a job should be able to assume the carriers bidding on it are licensed, insured, and who they say they are — not just take our word for it.

The Approval Process at a Glance

Six stages, always in this order. An application can only reach a human reviewer once every stage before it has cleared — nothing skips ahead.

Licence check

EA register, before any account exists

Account created

Only once the licence clears

Checklist submitted

Address, insurance, vehicles

Photo ID

Document + live selfie

Risk checks

Cross-checks & duplicates flagged

Human review

Approve · reject · request info

Photo ID is verified by Stripe Identity — RubbishBids never sees the document scan.

Step 0: The Licence Check Comes Before the Account

Most platforms let you create an account first and check credentials later. We flipped that. A prospective carrier enters their waste carrier licence number before anything else, and we check it live against the Environment Agency public register. If the licence doesn't clear, no account is created — no email, no password, no database row. There's nothing left behind to clean up.

Three things get checked at once, and only one combination passes:

A lower-tier or broker-only registration doesn't get a silent rejection — the applicant is told exactly why, and how to fix it. A CBDL holder, for example, sees this:

Once the Licence Clears: The Verification Checklist

With the licence confirmed, the carrier can create an account and moves into a checklist. Nothing is optional, and the application can't be submitted for review until every item is complete.

Proof of address

A utility bill, council tax bill or bank statement from the last 3 months, matching the address the carrier declared.

Public liability insurance

Insurer, policy number, cover amount and expiry date, plus an uploaded certificate. £2m cover is the minimum to pass; £5m or more earns a verified-insurance badge on the public profile.

Vehicles

Every registration plate and make/model the carrier will use to collect waste. Most carriers run more than one.

Photo ID with a live selfie

Handled entirely by Stripe Identity — a document scan (passport, driving licence or ID card) matched against a live selfie, not a static photo.

The order isn't random. Documents come first because they're free to check; the photo ID check is deliberately last, because it's the one step that costs money every time it runs — no point spending it on an application that would have failed for free reasons anyway.

What We Never See or Store

Photo ID is the most sensitive document in this whole process, so we don't handle it ourselves. It goes through Stripe Identity — the applicant is taken to a secure Stripe flow to photograph their document and take a live selfie, and Stripe returns a verdict, not the scan.

RubbishBids keeps only what's needed to review the application: whether the check passed, the name and date of birth as confirmed on the document, the document type and expiry, and — where a check fails — the reason, so a genuine carrier whose phone camera didn't cooperate isn't treated the same as someone whose document was rejected outright.

Every other supporting document — proof of address, insurance certificate — is uploaded to a private store that only our review team can access, never a public link. It is not the same storage used for job photos, which are meant to be shared.

Behind the Scenes: Cross-Checking, Not Just Collecting

Collecting documents is the easy part. The harder part is checking whether they agree with each other. Every application is automatically compared across five different pairs of facts, and a mismatch on any of them raises a flag for the person reviewing it:

None of this auto-rejects anyone. A mismatch — a married name that doesn't match an older ID, a recently changed address — is often perfectly innocent. What it does is sort the review queue, so a clean application with everything lining up gets looked at quickly, and one with several flags gets a closer look before anyone gets approved.

A Person Makes the Final Call

None of the checks above approve an account by themselves. Once a carrier submits, a reviewer sees the full picture — declared details side by side with the Environment Agency record, the photo ID result, every document, and every flag — and makes one of three decisions:

What This Means If You're Posting a Job

You shouldn't have to run your own background check on a rubbish removal company before letting them into your driveway. That's the point of this: every carrier bidding on your job has already cleared a licence check, an insurance check, an identity check, and a human's judgement — before they ever see your postcode.

Frequently Asked Questions