GoFuckYourself.com - Adult Webmaster Forum - Is ePassporte too secure? [No drama]

First off, I'd like to thank Keyser Soze for his outstanding service and patience with me during three hours today.

Cliffs: New account, unverified, stayed unverified because of excessive security.

I made an account with ePassporte to push some money to a designer that's working on a project of mine. He could only collect through ePassporte, so I figured it was going to be as easy as making a Paypal account.

I do not live in the US, but have US bank accounts and US credit cards. Those of you familiar with the economic disaster in Argentina and Uruguay in 2001 probably know why.

So I signed up to eP and I had to verify my account. No matter what I did, I couldn't get it to work. Time to contact Keyser Soze...

He said that since I wasn't living in the US, they had to verify the account by hand. I guess the only reason that they knew this was because I foolishly selected "Uruguay" as my country of residence. I could have avoided this mess by selecting "United States" and can probably still get away with doing it now too, but that's not the point of the thread.

As previously mentioned, Keyser said that he was going to need scans of my ID, scans of both sides of the credit card, a scan of a utility bill and another scan of a form they send, which I have to sign. I offered to send him high resolution pictures of the stuff instead and he said it was alright.

After taking all the pictures of my photo ID with the credit card right beside it, printing and signing the form and taking the pic of the telephone bill, I thought I was set. I was wrong.

Apparently, eP's risk department said that this was not enough evidence and they could not prove that the card was mine. I offered to give him my financial advisor's telephone number in Merrill Lynch, but he suggested that my advisor should send a letter, with the ML header on it, saying that the card was mine. I did not want to bug him with things like this, he has more important stuff to do.

I want to stop for a second and say that the name printed in the card and the name in my photo ID are identical. The name on my telephone bill is also exactly the same as the one printed in the card and ID. On top of that, my name is not something like "John James" or "Bob Williams". I have a very strange name which is uncommon in any country. No, I'm not a "José Gomez" either. What are the odds that I would have all that documentation without being me? The card and the ID, well they could be from a stolen wallet. But a telephone bill?

So I got to the point where I started making suggestions like "I'll take a picture of me holding the card with this ICQ window in the background" because I really didn't know how else to prove my identity. I have a verified PayPal account (ironically, with the same credit card), and I offered to transfer money to him to prove that the money was coming from the email address where he had just sent the form that I filled out. He said that the risk department didn't want that either. I offered more photo IDs and who knows what other ludacris methods of verification, but they wouldn't take it.

All they wanted was an email from the people at Merrill Lynch saying that the card was mine. Seriously, if I was really up to mischief and wanted to do credit card fraud, I could have easily spoofed the email address of a Merrill Lynch office and start my thing. I do not think that and email from my financial advisor would really prove anything, but what the hell...

It was already 5 at the ML office, so my advisor had already left his office. I had to call him to his cell phone -at international phone rates- and explained the situation. His first impression was that it was very strange that they were asking me for all this information and that I should stop doing it, followed by a "who did you say these guys are?" He also said that he could do the letter, but first it has to go through their legal department and some other departmend. If I was lucky, he could send that letter last thing tomorrow afternoon. I told him not to bother.

So where do we draw the line here? I had all sorts of proof to get this sorted out, yet some risk department kept requiring weird stuff from me. This sort of thing never happened to me and I'm able to shop for stuff on the Internet using that very same card with absolutely no problems. When I got my PayPal account, it took me like two days to verify it. I have gone at least four days on this and no where near getting the account set up. I even asked for an account where I couldn't add money to it using my credit card, just push and pull money from the people in there. That wasn't possible either.

So right now, I'm unable to pay this designer, I have money stuck with a kind and patient member of GFY who agreed to do the PayPal - ePassporte thing and got sucked into this mess and I can't use my unverified account.

Is this excesive security or am I just overreacting?

Again, by no means I want to offend the service I recieved from Keyser; I'm questioning what seems to be an exaggerated security protocol.

I wasn't planning on moving too much money with them anyway, so it's not like they lost a huge fish, but still...