I signed up for WeChat a few months ago, and later found out that WeChat was warning my Chinese friends that my account was unverified and to be careful. I had no idea it was telling them this until one of them told me.

I was also unable to log into the web/desktop client. The error message just said that for security reasons, only verified accounts were allowed to use WeChat through the web, but didn't give any instructions on how to get the account verified.

That's essentially a spam protection feature. Because WeChat has so few non-Chinese users, most "foreign" accounts are actually made by spammers. So you're graylisted until they become confident you're an actual human. I've only seen that warning message about an unverified account once among the 100+ foreign WeChat contacts I have (most of them Pakistanis), but I seem to recall that the warning also included an option to verify the contact. Obviously they don't want to give spammers a way to directly verify themselves.

Since 2018,newly created Wechat Account isn't able to login via Web Wechat anymore,using Windows WeChat is ok. If you don't keep your account active everyday through browsing or sending message, WeChat may be lock you out, saying it needs to verify the account.

"The error message just said that for security reasons, only verified accounts were allowed to use WeChat through the web"

If non-verified accounts were to have access to WeChat web, it would be significantly easier for people to operate bots on WeChat personal accounts, by spoofing the client as per this framework:

https://github.com/Chatie/wechaty

Interesting. I connected to my wife (who is originally from mainland China) and her family and I do not think they saw any warnings when chatting with me.

I signed up a few weeks ago. It worked for about a week, until I tried to sign in on a desktop.

I think some number of non-China mobile numbers need verification out of the box. And they've banned most VOIP/Virtual numbers from signing up; you can't use a Google Voice number, for instance.

Then, if you do sign up, there are hair-triggers on "suspicious use." But "suspicious use" means having multiple devices, asking for a password reset, not uploading a profile photo fast enough, or more than a few weeks of non-use.

All of those things are typical for foreign visitors, who don't have Chinese friends to verify them.

One thing that I ran into pretty quickly was there are different versions of WeChat: the chinese one and the -- in my case -- American one. When I was in China early last year I needed to get invited to properly set up my account. I absolutely was not able to use WeChat Pay which was quite frustrating tbh. Basically the American version is a striped down version where you can chat with the Chinese version, but WeChat Pay is not even an option and sending/receiving red letters is also not possible.

Same, although I had a friend who signed up around the same time who needed to go through some verification after using it for a few months.

wechat international account is not fully interoperatable with wechat china.