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I think Elon was suggesting that Telcos were turning a blind eye to the fraud that was damaging twitter, not that they were committing it directly. I think thi
by pcthrowaway 4y ago
I think Elon was suggesting that Telcos were turning a blind eye to the fraud that was damaging twitter, not that they were committing it directly.
I think this is actually the first sensible thing Elon has done since the takeover
- rhaway84773 4y ago> Basically, there are telcos who are not being super honest out there, in other parts of the world, who were basically gaming the system and running, like, two-factor authentication SMS texts over and over again, and just creating a zillion bot accounts to literally run up the tab so that Twitter would SMS text them, and Twitter would pay them millions of dollars, without even asking about it. He’s very clearly accusing the telcos themselves of creating bot accounts.
- pcthrowaway 4y agoTrue, his messaging wasn't consistent. He is calling them fraudsters (and suggesting some of them are doing it directly). Some of the fraud may be indirect though: > Listen, if you stop scamming us, then we will gladly pay you some amount of money for SMS texts but you can’t turn a blind eye to relentless bogus SMS texts The suggestion here is that the telcos are complicit in the fraud, but "blind eye" suggests they may not be directly responsible.
- lupire 4y agoIt's unclear if "you" is telcos or Twitter in the last part. Or depends if the fees were for SMS fees to the telco (!?) or fraudulent "pay-to-send-to SMS numbers" ("1-900" numbers), a massive scam that shouldn't exist at all.
- mort96 4y agoHmm, I interpreted the "you" to mean the general "you", not telcos; basically meaning that Twitter can't just turn a blind eye. Similar to how some might say: "I elected to the gym today; you can't just sit on the couch all day after all". That would certainly be a bit awkward wording though, using "you" to refer to both the telcos and to Twitter/the general "you" in the same sentence.
- Arnt 4y agoWould you say that a telco is complicit in fraud if it offers a negative rate to customers who take their inbound calls/SMSes in the building where the telco receives the calls/SMSes from its peers/upstream?
- honeybadger1 4y agoI don't exactly see the issue with telcos being accused. Telcos still have done almost nothing to address scammers, fraudulent texts and we all know it is because the benefit financially from their services being abused.
- sumeno 4y agoAddressing the issue is sensible, and yet he found the least sensible way to do it. Putting the onus on the user to remove sms two factor and making worse security a paid feature is just absurd.
- pcthrowaway 4y agoIt's not clear to me if Twitter offers other types of 2FA like TOTP. I don't use it. What do you think the solution is here though? If someone is using a company that's scamming twitter, it's not their responsibility to continue being scammed so they can support SMS 2FA for that user.
- ceejayoz 4y agoThey do, thankfully, support TOTP and U2F keys (and multiple of them).
- sumeno 4y agoA reasonable solution would be to disable the ability to add SMS 2FA to accounts and require either disabling 2FA or selecting a different 2FA method upon next login. If specific accounts with SMS 2FA manage to abuse it after that then ban those accounts, since you can't add SMS 2FA to a new account that removes their avenue for abuse.
- lupire 4y agoTwitter doesn't deserve to be help hostage by users using a fraudulent Telco.