I had to update my address on my driver’s license and they needed a couple pieces of mail with my new address and name on it to verify but I hadn’t gotten any mail at the new place yet.
Then I started thinking about it more and realized I haven’t actually received a letter addressed specifically to me in over a year, possibly in over 3 years. I have everything set to send by email because it isn’t 1950 anymore. Am I just a loser with no corporate pen pals or is physical mail an antiquated form of address verification now?
There’s plenty of these left over things.
Lots of official documents are issued electronically now, with no physical version.
Before with physical documents, if you wanted to provide a copy a bank would ask for it to be “certified as a true copy of the original”. That’s fine and sensible.
Then banks started asking for electronic copies of physical documents… but still wanted the document that was scanned to say that it was a true copy of the original. The obvious problem being that once you have an electronic copy you could just print the “certification” part on to whatever document you like. Whatever though, that’s what they ask for so sure.
More recently the final evolution of this shit show… a certified copy of an electronic document. So a client emails me a pdf, I print it, write on it that it’s a true copy of the pdf that was emailed to me, scan that and email it back. Note that I’m not making any comments about the content of the document. Merely that it’s a copy of some other document.
I guess proper verification is important at the end of the day but man, someone’s gotta think of better ways. But we do live in a world where my insurance company prefers using fax machines and banks run dos systems.