... asking users to “verify” their account after transferring $10,000 over the company’s network. One can get “verified” by either handing over bank account information or signing up for a PayPal-affiliated credit.
PayPal has long described this as a “risk-prevention technique,” but that makes little sense, because even customers with perfect track records must comply
Makes perfect sense to me. If having a perfect track record on your first $10k of transactions was enough to let you bypass the verification process, they'd see lots of criminals running $10k of shell transactions -- just like eBay scammers run up lots of perfect-feedback small purchases to create a good rating for themselves.