hosting company wants photo of drivers licence or passport wtf?

Supercell

I found a good deal (or so i thought) for web hosting from an American company.
So signed up , paid credit card. A few hours later I'm back home and decided i'd get to work copying files etc over and I see that the holding page now says account suspended!!
So I'm thinking maybe I screwed up entering the credit card details and logged a ticket on their site and got a reply back that for verification purposes they wanted a photo or scan of a photo id such as a drivers license or passport. FFS, if I was a criminal do they honestly think i wouldn't just photo shop my picture or something ??
Is this some new post 911 paranoid crap from American hosting companies?

In the last few years I've just been using Irish hosting and never had these hassles.
Seems like I should stick with it , the reason I wanted to change is my site just didn't work in China - it wasn't blocked - you get a big page up saying "FORBIDDEN" when that's the case, boards.ie is for example forbidden!
The dns just didn't work..so I figured a bigger American host might be the ticket for a new project.

Are all American hosts legally required to ask for this or are this hosting crowd "Hostmonster.com" just being anal?

Dingatron

I'm with them and never needed it when i created an acount 2 years ago. If I needed shell access they do require id though. Assumed it was some anti hacking measure?

Pixelcraft

it's most likely to do with processing your credit card. Some online stores based in the USA do this.

small

Ebay did this to a friend of mine... she set up a buyer account, but didn't really use it. Then tried to upgrade to a seller account a few months later and they had frozen her buyer account and some stupid dude in online support told her she'd need to send these deets to get it unfrozen and upgrade. She was like, no way, just cancel my account, and he was like we can't until you send us these deets. Then she was all, well can you please point me in the direction of the t's and c's that says all this, and he was like, eh no, um, eh, I don't think I can. In the end she got in touch with them again a few days later, the fella at the other end was less of a mule and there was a much simpler, and safer solution for her problem.

If I were you I'd give em some sass and demand to speak to a manager.....

TheWaterboy

This process is common enough practise with US hosting companies due to anti fraud measures and also the uploading of illegal sites. Its a simple process or scanning either your credit card and a passport or driving license.

mneylon

Most of the US hosting providers I've dealt with do it for non-US orders. We do the same with non-Irish orders - end result being that you may upset one or two people, but you don't get as many fraudulent orders and chargebacks

Supercell

Well I consider it an invasion of my privacy, I'm buying a service not weapons of mass destruction!, I don't want my picture going on some American database, besides if I was a real fraudster it would be trivial to fake it.
I cancelled the order and went with another host that rang me a few minutes after the online purchase to confirm i was who I said was. That was fast and professional and I had no problem with that.