It it worth a night in jail, a couple thousand dollars in legal fees and being felon to find out?

To your second point, yes, you would have to be committing a felony, which you wouldn't necessarily be. I got someone off a burglary charge that way once, since a burglary is defined as entering a premise for the purpose of committing a felony or a theft and the defendant only entered the premises for the purpose of slapping his girlfriend, which was a misdemeanor o_O

You do have to be careful though, violating the terms of service of a web site is at least a misdemeanor in a number of states (including Illinois), and is a felony for repeated violations.

I admit my experience in this domain has primarily been in financial services. We have different motivations than say, a social network. We plug into…as much signal is as commercially reasonable. Regardless, your identity assurance level will be governed by the effort and resources you’re willing to sink into the effort (data sources, remote identity proofing, device fingerprinting, activity heuristics, etc). If X wants to make sure you are who you say you are, they can, for a few dollars per user. And if you can’t identity proof because you don’t have a government credential, I’d hazard you don’t have much economic value to the platform (just facts, not a sleight).

For X, if you can show a gov ID that matches your credit card you’re paying with, that’s pretty high confidence you are who you say you are. Otherwise, you’re breaking the law (financial fraud if it’s not your credit card, edge cases aside if someone else is authorizing you to use their plastic).