It's to prevent fraud and a lot of hosting companies have some type of practice to try and prevent it. It's too bad that a few bad apples in the world make everything harder everyone else.
I didn't know HostGator was doing this, that kind of sucks :s But if you're doing stuff legal it doesn't matter anyways, it's all that they can do if they offer these oversized coupons for such a huge public
When I signed up for a Bluehost hosting account, they called me to verify my account. I didn't have to call or email them.
It may be unconvenient, but unfortunately there is a lot of fraud out there. If you read it carefully, you can just scan a driver's license and reply with it attached. Pretty simple. Or just scan the credit card and blur off all but the last 4 digits. Not really that tough. And you'd be glad they do it if you have ever been frauded. Andrej, this is no different from Hostgator. If you're in the USA, they will call you. He's in Latvia. I do recognize you're in Slovakia though. Just gotta realize most hosts won't call tiny eastern european countries and pay $0.50 a minute to figure out if they're being frauded (for obvious financial reasons) only to have the phone answered in a foreign language they can't speak.
Yes, they do it when they feel like the address is not correct or something like that. Godaddy did it to my friend once.
I've seen an influx of threads lately on various forums all about how people don't understand the verification process. It's actually a very standard thing. Now what I'm curious about in relation to the OP was, is this for a shared account or VPS/dedicated? Usually I've known shared/reseller services to be a little less strict on this and usually use an automated method of fraud checking that doesn't require photo ID's. However it is entirely normal and to be expected for dedicated services especially.
While I understand they might have some kind of verification process but hey .. verify it before I pay or keep you mouth shut later. As per whether I was doing something illegal .. they didn't even activate this account - I paid, they locked me out of billing system ( literally, I could log in but all of the sections were locked and I couldn't even see my payment history and such ) and disabled access to cPanel ( though they sent the details to my e-mail ). Am I worrying ? Definitely not - a refund have been granted and all my accounts closed on my request as I don't feel like doing business with them anymore ..
I think it is just routine. Immediately upon purchase I had access to my account but a few minutes later I received the very same email. It took one quick phone call (Less than a minute) and the account was active. They only asked for my name and order ID and that was it!