I've worked for a company that was acquired by EIG. Their whole support system is incredibly terrible, but account fraud is a legitimate constant concern. The fact that the guy prepaid doesn't really matter—Paypal accounts in particular are a breeding ground for stolen money/accounts.<p>My reading of this situation is that the person who wrote the article did something that got their account flagged as "this looks like a spammer we previously kicked off our service", at which point the automatic system kicked in to ask him for a copy of an ID because it thought he was probably some Russian or Chinese scammer. Yes, there are false positives, but even at the best hosting companies, there's a constant stream of foreign spammers and scammers. Constant. Like, multiple obvious questionable contacts per day for every single support/sales person on staff.<p>This is pretty much how it works at any major low-cost hosting company. EIG's awful customer service system (which is centralized across all the companies they own) means that they take forever to process everything, but <i>any</i> hosting company with prices low enough to have to deal with mass fraud is going to have similar procedures. It'll just at best (like it was at the company I worked for pre-acquisition) be somewhere where you can talk to a fraud specialist immediately on the phone, fax in a copy of an ID, and have your site back up in a half hour.<p>Also, of course the support person closed the chat. What the hell do you expect when you start talking about Homeland Security and the TSA? This is some guy in a cubicle who has no power to change policies and is trying to handle a half-dozen upset customers at once. He doesn't have time for your crap.
"why would I send a minimum wage support technician a copy of my passport and credit card?"<p>Sorry, you lost all my sympathy there where you start clearly making fun of the person's income for doing what they were trained to do and paid to do.
I was asked for scanning of similar data from Limestone Networks, but I've known them to never cheat anyone, so I didn't mind. But why for someone like HostGator to ask for so much identification? Their services aren't like LSN (Limestone) where it costs a lot of money, and you have to verify someone's not duping you with information they found online. Never hosted off HostGator, just not my cup of tea. Now I just use DigitalOcean, great service, for what I need it for, and affordable.
The complaint seemed eminently reasonable to me... up until the point where the author began taking an openly hostile tone with the support representative that he spoke with. Even though he had a deeply unpleasant experience, taking it out on the poor support guy is pretty unprofessional, and is really not terribly likely to reinforce the image that he's worth doing business with.<p>Sigh. Nasty to watch what HostGator did too, though.
I'll send a copy of my credit card and passport over your dead body. Of course then it own't matter.<p>Seriously what possible reason can they have for this for simple web hosting? What are they afraid of or is there some financial angle?