Originally Posted by Rochard

Oh, I can perfectly understand this. They want to prove that you are in fact you.

Why? It's simple - fraud.

Years ago I worked for a company where we were constantly being hit by fraud. An affiliate would sign up, get a few dozen sales, we would pay them out, and next month discover all of the credit cards were stolen. The only thing we could see from our end was that this person was on the upper east coast of the US - NY, NJ, and New England, etc. At a certain point the FBI got involved. It turns out the guy was a waiter at multiple restaurants in NYC, he would swipe new credit cards every night, drive out of the city to some place where he could get free internet (library, Starbucks, etc) and sign up for multiple affilaite accounts and also bang through credit cards.