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It makes it much harder to flood a given site with a large number of actions. For instance, if you require SMS verification for account signup, and you don't al
by snewman 13y ago
It makes it much harder to flood a given site with a large number of actions. For instance, if you require SMS verification for account signup, and you don't allow the same phone number to be used for more than, say, two signups per month, then you make it hard to create a large number of bogus accounts.
Yes, it will annoy some real users, so it's not a no-brainer. But it will put a major brake on many kinds of abuse.
- wpietri 13y agoYour underlying hypothesis here is that phone numbers are hard to get. But Twilio only charges $1/month per number, and presumably gets them for a lot less than that. If you use them for multiple nefarious purposes at once, your cost-per-evil could be pretty low. And that's assuming that you just don't steal them outright. Suppose you boost somebody's Android game, repackage it, and add a little code that intercepts and replies to certain text messages. It'd basically be a SMS botnet. SMS verification would make certain kinds of casual abuse harder, but I don't think it'd be a big barrier for well-organized assholes. E.g., the "Rachel from Cardholder Services" people that have been using the murkiness of the telephone network to sneak billions of illegal calls past the FTC.