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Sorry, I misread your previous comment. The site doesn’t advertise itself as a way to make money, its just incidental to how some people make money. Is scrapi

by costco 3y ago

Sorry, I misread your previous comment. The site doesn’t advertise itself as a way to make money, its just incidental to how some people make money. Is scraping a malicious purpose? Maybe in some cases. Either way I don’t see why this use of sim boxes shouldn’t be a civil dispute between companies and needs to be something the government should criminalize. Fraud is already illegal.

orf 3y ago
> The smspva website has been operating since 2013. During this time, we have gathered a large audience of users who trust us and earn money using our service And the use case they showcase involves mass creating Facebook pages. Come on. Are you really truly that naive? It’s vaguely legitimate business that just happens to offer a service that’s super useful to a particular type of clientele. Just like bulletproof hosting.
- costco 3y ago
  Is that supposed to always be bad? Unless the pages are used to promote some kind of fraud I don't think that's illegal. It's "dual use" like any other kind of anonymity technology. Cloudflare says 90% of Tor traffic is malicious - does that mean hosting relays and using Tor should be criminalized? Regardless, that was just a minor point about one potential use of SIM farms. The proposal says they intend to make possession a criminal offence and they don't even have data on whether these devices are used for fraud at scale in the UK.
  - orf 3y ago
    If you go around selling micro sized mobile phones close to a prison then you can plead all you want that it’s not fraudulent, it’s just for people with tiny hands and it’s ridiculous to imply that it’s anything other than a legitimate business. However, it’s not. It’s got one clear use case and one clear market. We started this discussion on sim farms and your very first point here (and in other places in this post) linked directly to the kind of thing that should, and hopefully will, be criminalised in the UK. Because it’s quite obvious what it really is, even if you apparently can’t see it? I find that quite hilarious.
asdadsdad 3y ago
how is scraping related to sim farms?
- costco 3y ago
  Scraping services that require phone verified accounts but reject VOIP numbers. Someone (in house or a service like smspva) operating SIM farm would be required in order to do this economically.
  - asdadsdad 3y ago
    that's the first time I heard about creating fake verified accounts to scrape. I wonder how profitable that is compared to the obvious malicious use cases like astroturfing/spamming

by costco 3y ago

orf 3y ago

> The smspva website has been operating since 2013. During this time, we have gathered a large audience of users who trust us and earn money using our service And the use case they showcase involves mass creating Facebook pages. Come on. Are you really truly that naive? It’s vaguely legitimate business that just happens to offer a service that’s super useful to a particular type of clientele. Just like bulletproof hosting.

costco 3y ago
Is that supposed to always be bad? Unless the pages are used to promote some kind of fraud I don't think that's illegal. It's "dual use" like any other kind of anonymity technology. Cloudflare says 90% of Tor traffic is malicious - does that mean hosting relays and using Tor should be criminalized? Regardless, that was just a minor point about one potential use of SIM farms. The proposal says they intend to make possession a criminal offence and they don't even have data on whether these devices are used for fraud at scale in the UK.
- orf 3y ago
  If you go around selling micro sized mobile phones close to a prison then you can plead all you want that it’s not fraudulent, it’s just for people with tiny hands and it’s ridiculous to imply that it’s anything other than a legitimate business. However, it’s not. It’s got one clear use case and one clear market. We started this discussion on sim farms and your very first point here (and in other places in this post) linked directly to the kind of thing that should, and hopefully will, be criminalised in the UK. Because it’s quite obvious what it really is, even if you apparently can’t see it? I find that quite hilarious.

asdadsdad 3y ago

how is scraping related to sim farms?

costco 3y ago
Scraping services that require phone verified accounts but reject VOIP numbers. Someone (in house or a service like smspva) operating SIM farm would be required in order to do this economically.
- asdadsdad 3y ago
  that's the first time I heard about creating fake verified accounts to scrape. I wonder how profitable that is compared to the obvious malicious use cases like astroturfing/spamming