> They're not the only ones to do that: I've seen other sites asking these vids.

So basically they're trying to do a "liveness" check, probably under the assumption that videos are too hard to fake (and hopefully they compare the ID documents against the video). Honestly, that seems legitimate to me. With data leaks and generative AI, it's going to be increasingly hard to do the kind of identity verification tasks online that we take for granted.

I predict there will soon be a huge necessity and demand for in-person notaries to verify identities for online services. Want to open a bank account online and there's no branch nearby? Go to some ID verification business with a ticket number from the sign up workflow, they check your documents, and then they tell the bank if you checked out or not.