[Klathmon]

That's very true, so I guess at the end of the day manual verification is needed for just about everything where you absolutely need a user to be able to recover their account.

A scheme like the above still helps cut down on the number of times that manual verification will have to be used, and hopefully can be made rare enough that you can spend the proper amount of time verifying each one to do your best to prevent "stolen identities" from being used.