They have passport scans?
I'm impressed by how hard MtGox is fucking up.
I'm impressed by how hard MtGox is fucking up.
Maybe this can serve as a warning that the tedious processes used by banks and other institutions handling "serious" money can't just be disrupted away.
But I totally understand why people did supply it.
They supplied it because:
1) They've been trained to
2) For a while MtGox was actually the most well-known (and therefore trusted) of the exchanges
On #1, every financial institution in the world goes through some form of KYC (Know Your Customer) anti-laundering process that involves identity verification. And people are so used to doing this when signing up to financial accounts that they failed to comprehend that MtGox (and other exchanges) is not a financial institution being regulated by the same safeguards for their data.
On #2, even if you accepted that they were not a financial institution almost all of the bitcoin exchanges are asking for verification. And the larger more well-known exchanges are viewed as "least risky". It's a herd-like mentality, if these thousands of others did it, it must be safe.
I never supplied the info, to this or other exchanges, but I totally see why excited people who feared missing out as the price rose were willing to do so.
After some back and forth with them I somehat angrily provided ID and got my money returned. It later turned out that they had either been dishonest or incompetent in their argument for providing ID, and I got them to promise me that they had deleted any and all ID docs I sent them, specifically because of scenarios like this one.
Well, I hope they were telling the truth.