I can corroborate that we were unable to activate a wechat account for my (western) friend. Not payments, just a normal chat account.

Upon registration, Wechat asked him to get someone to confirm/sponsor his account. I tried to, and was told that my account couldn't verify other accounts because my account was suspicious.

I then solicited my spouse's help. She managed to go through the process of verifying his account, but when I told my friend to try logging in again, he said he was still marked as "suspicious" and wasn't able to log in

Edit: this was recent (last week)