u/Final_Distance_6303

Honestly, this whole thing with Prolific feels sketchy to me.

They ask people for government-issued IDs and face scans/biometric verification, then a lot of people seem to get hit with vague “failed verification” messages with no real explanation and no meaningful manual review process.

In my case, I never even got to complete a single study. My account was permanently rejected during verification. I appealed it and got the same copy-paste response saying the decision was final and they couldn’t help further.

What makes it even weirder is that when I later tried making another account. Four months later (yesterday) I received a invite email. Upon clicking the link they somehow detected me again almost immediately before I even entered a phone number on the new account. That means they are clearly retaining and matching some kind of identity/device/biometric information even after accounts are supposedly “closed.”

So naturally it makes me question:
What exactly are they storing?
How long are they storing it?
What are these ID scans and face scans actually being used for behind the scenes?

At this point, I personally think this company may be using all of this verification data to further train or improve AI/fraud-detection systems while ordinary users get permanently locked out with no transparency and no real way to challenge mistakes.

And before anybody says “your ID must’ve been fake” — my ID is legitimate. I use it to fly, bought a car with it, and it has the REAL ID emblem. I scanned it using an iPhone 17 Pro Max, so quality wasn’t the issue either.

I’m not the only person I’ve seen complain about being instantly rejected with no clear explanation. Has anyone else experienced this?

I purchased two qualifying laptops from the Microsoft Ultimate College Bundle list. There has been no pop-up or email over the past three days asking to verify my student status. I have even factory reset (losing my school lab downloaded programs) multiple times with the same result. There doesn't seem to be a way to contact Microsoft to figure this out. They only provide an email that never gets a reply. At this point, I'm going to return these computers and get a new Mac or a gaming PC. This is ridiculous. They are advertising this all over the internet with no real information.

I purchased two qualifying laptops from the Microsoft Ultimate College Bundle list. There has been no pop-up or email over the past three days asking to verify my student status. I have even factory reset (losing my school lab downloaded programs) multiple times with the same result. There doesn't seem to be a way to contact Microsoft to figure this out. They only provide an email that never gets a reply. At this point, I'm going to return these computers and get a new Mac or a gaming PC. This is ridiculous. They are advertising this all over the internet with no real information.

I purchased two qualifying laptops from the Microsoft Ultimate College Bundle list. There has been no pop-up or email over the past three days asking to verify my student status. I have even factory reset (losing my school lab downloaded programs) multiple times with the same result. There doesn't seem to be a way to contact Microsoft to figure this out. They only provide an email that never gets a reply. At this point, I'm going to return these computers and get a new Mac or a gaming PC. This is ridiculous. They are advertising this all over the internet with no real information.