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Well, I mean there's no way I can prove this but I think it has more to do with the fact that compared to email verification ($0.002/hotmail address), CAPTCHA (

by costco 3y ago

Well, I mean there's no way I can prove this but I think it has more to do with the fact that compared to email verification ($0.002/hotmail address), CAPTCHA ($0.003/reCAPTCHA), it substantially raises account creation costs because real US/EU phone numbers will be at least a couple cents per verification.

AnthonyMouse 3y ago
There are a bunch of services that put any SMS received by a bunch of phone numbers on a public website, and they change the phone numbers all the time. You can go to any one of them and use it to create an account for free. Of course, this is another reason why the practice is harmful -- legitimate users with a legitimate desire to be anonymous will do this, and then if you use the number provided for account recovery, someone can steal their account after the number gets recycled. (This also happens to normies when people change their phone number and don't update it with your service; don't use phone numbers for password recovery. The near-100% probability of being reissued is a disaster.) But what happens at scale, for actual wholesale-level spammers? They get a contact with a phone carrier who lets them use all their unissued numbers. They operate one of these public SMS websites, which not only doesn't cost them money but turns a small profit because of the ad revenue. They do the same thing, but privately, and sell the availability of thousands of phone numbers to other spammers. Then they resell the SIMs to recover the money because they never actually used any of the prepaid data. Which makes offering the service to other spammers cheap, which keeps the price low if you want to be a buyer instead of a seller. The more people who try to do this on their service, the better this scales, because the customer base increases. It's just not meant for this and the inconvenience and privacy invasion to legitimate users is unreasonable.

by costco 3y ago

AnthonyMouse 3y ago

There are a bunch of services that put any SMS received by a bunch of phone numbers on a public website, and they change the phone numbers all the time. You can go to any one of them and use it to create an account for free. Of course, this is another reason why the practice is harmful -- legitimate users with a legitimate desire to be anonymous will do this, and then if you use the number provided for account recovery, someone can steal their account after the number gets recycled. (This also happens to normies when people change their phone number and don't update it with your service; don't use phone numbers for password recovery. The near-100% probability of being reissued is a disaster.) But what happens at scale, for actual wholesale-level spammers? They get a contact with a phone carrier who lets them use all their unissued numbers. They operate one of these public SMS websites, which not only doesn't cost them money but turns a small profit because of the ad revenue. They do the same thing, but privately, and sell the availability of thousands of phone numbers to other spammers. Then they resell the SIMs to recover the money because they never actually used any of the prepaid data. Which makes offering the service to other spammers cheap, which keeps the price low if you want to be a buyer instead of a seller. The more people who try to do this on their service, the better this scales, because the customer base increases. It's just not meant for this and the inconvenience and privacy invasion to legitimate users is unreasonable.