Starlink now wants your passport and a live selfie – even if you never leave the UK
Key Points
- Starlink is asking UK customers for passport scans and a live portrait through a new Travel Registration policy.
- A red "Customer verification required" banner gives users 25 days before their service is deactivated.
- The banner can appear even for customers who have never taken their dish outside the UK.
- Failing to register does not stop billing, with Starlink continuing to charge customers whose service it has disabled.
- Starlink has 110,000 UK customers, mostly rural, served by nearly 10,400 satellites in low Earth orbit.
Starlink has started asking UK customers for passport scans and a live selfie, giving them 25 days to comply or lose their internet.
A red banner reading “Customer verification required” is now appearing inside the accounts of UK Starlink users, warning them that “regulations require that additional information must be provided or your service will be deactivated in 25 days.”
The banner is the front end of a new Travel Registration policy that Elon Musk’s SpaceX has begun pushing onto Starlink subscribers in Britain and elsewhere.
Starlink has run something like this in a handful of countries before, but the rollout is now hitting a much wider customer base.
The catch that has rattled customers is the trigger. The banner can appear even if the customer has never taken their dish outside the UK. The mere possibility that they might one day connect from abroad seems enough to set the verification clock running.
What Starlink wants from you
To clear the banner and keep the internet flowing, Starlink wants the following from residential customers: Full Legal Name, Nationality, Date of Birth, Passport Number, a Copy of your Passport, and a Live Portrait (a real-time selfie taken through the app).
Premium Business accounts also have to upload a Registration Number and a Copy of their Registration Document. Starlink says “additional details may be required for other Travel registrations as per local regulations,” meaning the list can grow depending on where you connect from.
Customers complete the registration through the My Account portal, under Settings, by scrolling to Registration Requirements and selecting “Add Travel Plans,” then Global. Once submitted, the information goes through a Starlink review before the banner clears.
Why the company is going this far
The most likely reason, given the breadth of the trigger, is a clampdown on misuse of the service by criminal groups, scammer networks, drug operations, and hostile militaries.
Portable Starlink Mini dishes have surfaced in conflict zones and on illegal mining sites well beyond the geographies they were sold into, and a live portrait combined with passport data makes it harder for accounts to be passed around or used under false identities.
That logic does not explain why an ordinary UK rural customer with no travel intent now gets the same banner.
Starlink’s wording strongly suggests it is hoovering up the data as a default for every account that could ever conceivably travel, rather than waiting for the device to actually cross a border.
The billing line that stings
Buried in the Starlink support article is the part customers are likely to find hardest to swallow.
If service is disabled because travel registration is incomplete, billing carries on regardless.
Starlink puts it bluntly: “Billing continues even if your service is disabled due to incomplete travel registration. You can cancel your service line at any time from your account portal to stop billing.”
In other words, if a UK customer ignores the banner, loses their connection, and does nothing else, Starlink keeps charging £35 a month for the standard Residential 100Mbps unlimited plan, or £50 a month for the 100GB roaming option, until the customer logs in and pulls the plug themselves.
How big Starlink has got in the UK
Starlink now operates close to 10,400 satellites in low Earth orbit, mostly between 340km and 550km up, and ended 2025 with around 9 million customers globally, up from 6 million in July.
In the UK, the customer base reached 110,000 in July 2025, up from 87,000 in 2024, with most of those connections in rural areas where fibre and decent fixed wireless still struggle to reach.
That makes the verification push consequential.
A meaningful share of Britain’s hardest to connect homes now run on a network that wants their passport, their face on camera, and a fully filled in form, all to keep the broadband they already pay for.
