After some back and forth my account was reinstated. It wasn't a huge deal but a shitty way to start my day. And after asking multiple times I was never told the reason why I had to go through this.
I had been happy until now. This just left a bad taste in my mouth.
edit: What pissed me off was having to send in a copy of my government issued ID.
For sure it's a pain in the ass and we've been discussing another verification methods, as I'm sure you can imagine, with adding 100s of accounts a day we need to make sure the public internet and our internal networks are relatively protected from someone spinning up vms for DDoS but also from compromised boxes and accounts.
If we publicly revealed how to trigger our verification process (that genuinely does a good job of protecting our network and customers) I'd imagine people would work to figure out ways to circumvent it. Occasionally we trigger a false positive, but I really believe that it's important to have this system in place.
I appreciate your feedback, and I'll make sure your comments get discussed at our next product meeting.
1: I wasn't notified that there was any problem with my account. 2: I have no idea what the repercussions of being suspected of fraud entails. Will my sites be shut down and if so then when? 3: I was only informed that something was wrong when I logged in and tried to give you money.
So what would have happened if I had paid for six months of hosting in advance (like I have done in the past)?
For fucks sake. Send off a email so I am not frantically backing up databases while waiting for my ticket to get replied to.
https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/initial-serv...
Don't miss "Step Five— Configure SSH (OPTIONAL)".
My assumption is that my droplet is considerably safer than it was to start with.
Next step: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/how-to-prote...
Another edit: I got a helpful reply.
There has been a response to your ticket:
Greetings,
Unfortunately, we are unable to provide further information with regard to our backend abuse filters.
If we may be of any further assistance, please do let us know.
Regards, * Mitchell | Support Team
Because it's pretty obvious to me that people would create throwaway accounts to probe for all the fraud checks, then start creating abusive accounts.
A lot of people just use webhosting companies as a testing ground before magging a real card and going on a spending spree.