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.