This also applies to anti-money-laundering stuff: it's better to affect loads of people really badly who are most certainly not money laundering as long as it does not affect the people who are money laundering at scale.

That said, there are people who don't really understand that people on social media paying you for access to your bank account are probably money laundering.

This is in a country where it is perfectly permitted to open several stores of the same chain of gambling establishments in the same street with fixed-odds betting machines and no questions of where the large sums of cash being handed over come from.

Apparently in the past people with questionable sources of income used to open fake accounts to move money and the banks were happy to do it until the regulators slammed them with fines.

Also, when you have a bank account you can get things like a phone contract with a direct debit payment. Apparently, some people made it a habit to leave the UK without paying their bills after they are done with their seasonal work.

I'm sure some people run much more elaborate scams.

A passport is enough to prove your identity isn't fake. But since it's not enough to give you a credit line, banks simply refuse the service. There are way too many people with no access to banks.

They did https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girobank https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_Office_Money

A passport is enough to prove your identity isn't fake

Theoretically, perhaps, but in practice anyone who needs to validate identity will ask for multiple forms of ID.