Associating an address is as easy as Googling "1 Main Street" in whatever town you'd like, and grabbing the zip code. There's no real verification to it.

That's not true, at least not in the US. In particular, the Vanilla Visa prepaid cards sold at Walgreens and CVS don't even allow you to register an address, only optional registration of a ZIP code for partial address verification.

Some, but not most, vendors do require more extensive address information on file.