I know this process can be invasive but you would be surprised how

many bogus requests I've received over the years.  I have to assume this is because of the scarcity of IPv4 addresses

I agree with that!  I also get requests from people who just want to use it for internet hosting unrelated to amateur radio, and without mentioning a valid callsign at all. Of course Quan also does not mention his callsign in his mailinglist message.  A lookup on QRZ.COM indicates he likely has a BG3 callsign, but for me it would be suspicious when I receive a communication like that because any radio amateur knows that it is customary to use a callsign rather than only first and last name when communicating between radio amateurs. Just last week I got (as the coordinator for Netherlands) a request from someone likely living in Denmark (a nearby country) with just a fake word in the callsign field.  Maybe he got turned away by the Danish coordinator and tried with me, maybe he wasn't even aware of the subnetting by country, I don't know. But we really need to watch out for people trying to masquerade as a radio amateur and trying to obtain IP space for free.

Of course it doesn't help that the portal does not convey that information.  It is likely that googling for services offering IP space somehow refers those people directly to the portal or to a subpage of the wiki, they read some paragraphs about obtaining IP space and never see what is the target audience for this system. That is mentioned only in some toplevel pages, not in the actual procedures for obtaining addresses. Someone from outside our community may not know what "callsign" means and just enter a netname as they would use in whois. So there is room for improvement there.

About the ID and personal info requirement, I certainly have not been asked for an ID photo and it would be a problem to have such things on file indeed. But having some personal contact info (like name, callsign, e-mail and street address) should be fine as it is required to contact the registrant in case of problems.

Rob PE1CHL