I can't speak for every company, but I know with Facebook and Paypal, these requests generally are from automated systems and the chances of successfully reopening the account is well under 1%. The info you submit is not viewed by a human and the systems are mostly treated as a way to lighten the load on human support staff. They don't care if your account is reopened, they just want you to feel like you had a chance, did all you could, and then just give up.

I discovered this about 20 years ago dealing with Paypal. I happened to know someone who worked in Paypal engineering at the time. I had a well established account, a Paypal debit card, linked accounts, etc., everything you could need to feel good about an account.

Out of the blue it was suspended and I was sent into this system to send in verification documents. I gave everything it wanted. First it was ID, then a "utility bill" so I sent over my phone bill. That wasn't acceptable because it didn't prove I lived at my address for some reason, so I sent a natural gas bill. Even though that did have to be tied to a physical address (you can't deliver gas wirelessly!) I was asked for an electric bill. Then the lease. Then a bank statement. Every time I gave it pretty quickly. Then I was asked for a passport. I didn't have one. Suddenly that was the only thing that could unlock my account and as soon as they had the passport my account would be reopened. Nothing further would be done without a passport, not even communication.

I asked my friend to look into it. She said, "that's on purpose, that's the NoBot. It gets people out of support's hair." Turns out if you let unhappy customers complain to humans on the phone they will, so some exec decided to improve call center metrics by forcing customers into a system designed to keep them occupied until they gave up. You funneled people into it, and it would continue to reject their submissions with new reasons infinitely. It just went through a list of things to ask for, and when it found one you couldn't provide, suddenly that was the key and without it you were screwed.

Companies still do this today.

Sometimes it works with the front camera on one smartphone but doesn’t with another (iPhone 17’s distortion), sometimes it recognizes your face on one day, but desperately fails to recognize you on another. I had to repeatedly record videos for it only to fail over and over again. Anything their system flags as suspicious, anything, will trigger the same video identification flow again, which effectively blocks your money in the account.

I’m closing my accounts with a couple of banks with these video id flows. Simply because it’s way too easy to lose access to my money in the account with them. If their QA is not good enough for this vital requirement, I don’t want to know how they treat other requirements. They simply outsourced the id verification to some third parties that are way too unreliable.

At least Facebook tells you that you are banned.

I could still tell because their profiles were sterile and had few normal comments or likes etc. Also a high school class has a very narrow age range. We recently landed a fatal blow by disallowing joins by "pages" and adding a few questions. A trickle continued but stopped recently.

The hamfisted false positive response you described is probably a result of the above.

So I tried to sign up (and I already HAVE an active facebook account from high school, with hundreds of friends) and it wanted me to scan my face. I did it, which I regret, only to be told five days later that I am too suspicious. So here I am, still locked out of all this information lmao

I feel very badly for your friend. Unfortunately, those completely benign actions look identical to a common identity theft pattern.