Yeah, this wouldn't be at all unique to Paxful.
I don't think this is really tag-worthy behaviour anymore (Polo/Bittrex and a whole bunch of other exchanges were let off scott-free after doing similar stuff.) - although I really do think it should be.
I haven't followed paxful for a while, but if they did retroactively block old customers' funds without giving them a chance - that's indeed scummy, and entirely in line with their site's policy and userbase.
The amount of trust-circles which pad one's reputation might just make up 90% of their total trades, at least it did.
The funny thing is: Only legit people are really affected by this; It would be trivial to photoshop a document / selfie to pass KYC, heck, you can buy a set for < 100$.
Especially for a lot of unbanked/underdeveloped countries (the unbanking they claim to support: (E: large portions of African/South American/South-East Asian countries)), it is actually impossible to verify their ID's beyond checking for photoshop. (There'd be simply no way to verify these ID's with something like equifax, although i sincerely question whether paxful even has access to something like that for her U.S customers.)
Anyway, long story short, these P2P exchanges suck and are full of scammers.