Not necessarily. The last spat I had with them was repeated non receipt of my emails during a previous account verification, and it was pretty random as they were getting some but not others. At least with the upload they can't claim they didn't get it because the upload process confirms successful receipt. The worst they can do now is reject the document for some spurious reasons, maybe it's blurred, too white, too black, etc
I did also get an email, but this directed me to use the upload, and didn't provide for sending the documents back by email. It's possible they got into trouble for using insecure email for handling personal information as defined in the Data Protection Act, something I may have mentioned in passing during the previous spat where they kept "losing emails containing my personal data as covered by the DPA and the ICO
".
However, there is a distinct smell about this whole affair. I was told I had exceeded my annual limits, but I have a VIP verified account which has spent 2 years at platinum. I was "exceeding the limits" even more during this time, but verification has ALWAYS been notified in advance, and time given to send the documents before the account was restricted. Now the restriction happens the instant the request is generated, yet exceeding a deposit allowance is easily foreseeable based on my regular activity, so they should have been able to give me enough time to send in the documents and have them verified before I hit the limit.
I rather suspect that they are lying, and this whole thing has arisen due to something very recent, like them discovering a recent hack on their database which like the last one they want to keep hidden from customers and merchants alike, but for which they also need to find out whether or not accounts have actually been hijacked, so they are having a reverification trigger go off on all accounts that hit a relatively small threshold, and using some BS reason to explain to customers why.
They ONLY want the proof of address, NOT another set of ID documents, and can't allow a second of grace between requesting this and disabling transactions on the account. Then after a weekend of all this, they mysteriously go down today