The point people often forget about "jailed" SSH shells is that they're pretty weak! There isn't any way to provide shell access where the user cannot escalate themselves to root privileges and therefore potentially cause problems.
As for the faxing some ID etc. I really don't see why that helps? Firstly I'd hope to know who someone is based on the fact they paid me - if you have any doubts about that then you're looking at a chargeback etc. anyway so you already have problems of sorts.
The notion that providing SSH explicitly increases costs is just plain false IMO - but... obviously when your £5/mo customer with shell access decides to exploit the server in some way using their escalated privileges (which they found how to do via a simple Google search btw) it ends up costing you a lot more than £5/mo in customers who leave your shared servers or even just in admin time to restore backups and so on.
Oh, and before anyone decides to explain that they're really good and have no malicious intent - that's great, but what about the guy that just brute forced your SSH account? Or didn't need to try so hard because you set your password to 'password' 
SSH is only offered by shared hosts who don't have a clue about the problems they're creating for themselves. That's pretty much the reason why it tends to be the smaller hosts that offer it.
If you want or really need SSH then get yourself a VPS. Don't want to manage a VPS? Get a managed VPS; any provider who understands won't have any issues offering you SSH on a VPS as the worst that happens is your VPS gets nuked - other customers shouldn't be affected (although possible for some disruption caused by short-term network abuse or similar).
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