> Is it really industry practice? Can anybody in this field confirm this? I can see why it would be useful for billing as they mention, but is this really an ef

> Is it really industry practice? Can anybody in this field confirm this? I can see why it would be useful for billing as they mention, but is this really an effective way to do age verification? I'm in the field, and this is indeed standard industry practice. It is useful for many purposes, billing and age verification being just two, but the main root reason being that wireless carriers typically use the mobile number as the root identity for a subscriber profile that is shared across multiple backend systems. It's an effective way to do age verification provided the carrier has implemented some type of process during sign-up or via some other (in)direct method, mainly by leveraging the identity of the subscriber and running a check against it.