Not defending him, but he does state that unlike the other mobile providers he's worked with, this K-Pop company's backend system would lock _any_ phone number,

Not defending him, but he does state that unlike the other mobile providers he's worked with, this K-Pop company's backend system would lock _any_ phone number, not just the ones they're responsible for. Perhaps he didn't know this. I bet normally he'd generate random numbers not associated with the provider, check they show up as "locked" in the database, under the assumption that the backend actually doing the locking signal would reject the numbers due to them being under control of another operator. It's similar to our networking lab where we generate bogus traffic using random src/dst IP addresses under the assumption that our null routes and firewall will block them from the real Internet. In this case, the provider just decided no firewall was needed. We can't use "fake" IP addresses (yes there are IP ranges for internal use but that doesn't work for certain testing scenarios.)