Cryptsy is starting with USD trading soon and are required to ask for official ID"s before you're allowed to trade even 1 dollar. If they don't, they would be shut down within no time by the government. That's a financial matter that goes way beyond a simple mining contract and requires different credentials.
By the way, in all the examples you show, no customer is holding up signs
If GM wants to have extensive appraisal pages, then fine, might not be a bad idea, but no company will ask it's customers to hold up signs just because a very tiny portion of potential customers have extensive (actually I'm thinking unreasonable) legitimacy demands.
Would it help if I did that?! Would it make GM suddenly more reliable for you? Or would you go about thinking it might be a setup still...
Cryptsy seems to be going the extra mile and requiring the additional photo ID + photo of "you", the other's just use Photo ID/Passport and Residential Bill.
I'm aware that none of the examples should the exact method I suggested. I'm unable to find such specifics; only seems to occur on social media. This is why, after looking at other Testimonial pages, suggested Genesis use Shopify's way. It's hard to fake a twitter account to be older than it actually is...in fact, the only way would be to have someone on the 'inside'.
...don't forget, the postings too. An old account that only started posting tweets a few weeks ago is also suspicious.
So, a twitter account that's 'old', and has frequently tweeted would lend a lot more credibility to Genesis's operation.
I know this is 'unreasonable', but the only other option is to give them money and see if 'you' get any back, which even a Ponzi Scheme does...for a while. So even that isn't
reasonable proof.
This is why there needs to be an 'eBay' or 'Amazon' for Bitcoin companies to register with. Whether it's selling goods for BTC instead of cash, cloud mining, or investing (buy low sell, sell high for profit-making), it'd be a one-stop-shop for all things BTC. This way users can rate a company or file a report to have the company removed from the site (obviously, would take significant amount of reports).
Then, the community can just use that site to look for Bitcoin options. This would make it much harder to run a scam operation, because people wouldn't (or shouldn't) trust any company not on that 'BTC Hub' site. And you can't stay on (or better yet, even get on) if you're not legit.
((What can I say, I'm OCD about finding ways to prevent loopholes....it's what I do
))