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Comment by johnisgood | Hacker News Reader

> The remaining 1 time it's because someone knows how to abuse reporting systems to get someone locked out on purpose.

My Twitter account got disabled many months ago due to "suspicious activity". I did not do anything. At the time I talked to someone with whom I disagreed respectfully on a CS-related subject and was not political. Next thing that happens is that it asks me to verify via phone and only then I am able to use my account. I am not going to do that, so yeah.

What I believe happened is that he attempted to login to my account a few times, which triggered their bullshit...

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Twitter routinely disables accounts for "suspicious activity" as a scummy way to harvest phone numbers (despite the account supposedly being considered dangerous and in breach of the ToS, simply providing a phone number immediately restores it without any human review).

Perhaps your FBI agent requested Twitter for some help figuring out your true identity.

Wonder if they've blocked the providers of temporary virtual phone numbers?

Presumably the known providers such as Twilio, etc are blocked, but there are small companies that provide numbers from the same number ranges as the big cellular carriers so those are completely undetectable.

I suspect if there would be enough demand for this service, a "grey" industry of people buying prepaid SIMs and renting access to them would appear.

Phone number risk scoring models would heavily weigh against behavior like that. Prepaid numbers are typically scored worse than post paid numbers as well, but that sort of behavior would quickly be identified as fraudulent.

> Prepaid numbers are typically scored worse than post paid numbers as well, but that sort of behavior would quickly be identified as fraudulent.

This assumes there is a way to tell which numbers are prepaid or not. To the best of my knowledge they both originate from the same pool of numbers and it is impossible for an outsider to tell whether a given carrier's number is prepaid or postpaid.

I once got locked out of my Veeva Vault account because I couldn't remember who I put as "who was your best friend in kindergarten?" (I had like 8 best friends then!). After putting in a ticket and hearing nothing back I finally braved the phone system and called support line. The rep who unlocked my account and reset my password assigned me 4 different modules of 60-question EACH mandatory training in order to get back into my "dashboard."

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