i just bought a $100 amazon gift card through the bitpay wallet a few moments ago. no KYC required. also bought $500 in gift cards ~12 hours ago on egifter through bitpay---same.
Do you think Bitpay could have found enough information about you through one of the many possible channels such that they decided not to bother to ask you for KYC?
This is almost certainly not the case. Either they have KYC information, or they don't. It is possible their software is not properly written to request KYC for customers when their policy says it should.
if i can't get amazon gift cards through the bitpay wallet anymore, the only other consistent option will be bitrefill, and they charge a pretty big markup.
What prices are BitPay charging for their cards? I've never found Bitrefill prices to be that expensive. At the moment, a $500 Amazon card works out to around $503 worth of bitcoin, but with the 1% reward that they offer that comes out at $498. You can even get up to 5-6% back on some other retailers, which makes their cards work out pretty cheap indeed.
Another use from the BCash subreddit seems to be reporting the same thing recently. Using BitPay to try to pay for food delivery and being met with KYC demands -
https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/ksjbld/bitpay_now_requiring_full_kyc_info_to_pay_for/Weird. In my region at least, its pretty darn expensive. For 100 USD of Amazon card, I have pay around 125-133 USD$ worth of btc. Same goes for netflix and other gift cards, I would have to pay 25% more of what the actual value of the gift card is. feelsBadMan.
Either I am incredibly wrong somewhere, or its just my region pricing.
Some gift cards they are selling have strangely high markup pricing. My guess is they sell those gift cards in a low enough of a volume that costs associated with procuring the gift cards is so high they need to charge more.
I would think Netflix and Amazon would not meet the above criteria though.