Comment by parable

This is how account recovery procedures used to work at a certain gaming company. They used to train support agents on what makes an account high-value and apply additional scrutiny to those recovery cases, while letting low-value accounts be recovered with less information. It worked, for the most part, but because the valuation of a given account was based on the agent, some agents used to value accounts differently. You could get away with stealing a high-value account if you got the right agent in a support ticket. The tradeoff in this case was time spent - you'd have to create a lot of email addresses and plausible but vague tickets, though some attackers automated that process. Eventually, they just applied the same scrutiny level against every account and called it a day.