Hacker News Reader

Comment by ayewo | Hacker News Reader

In practice, how does the fraud work?

I think it might be like this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34265433

Telco companies allow people to set up numbers which cost money to send an SMS to.

Then those people set up bot farms to register for Twitter repeatedly, triggering a verification text, which Twitter then has to pay.

The telcos aren't committing the fraud directly, but they are profiting from it.

Wow that's so much more retarded than I expected. I thought it was the telcos setting up bots to get an increased amount of texts with standard fees. Simple, difficult to detect.

My private number can't send texts to premium numbers, that an automated 2FA system could is so ridiculous I would never even try it. I guess that's why they're better fraudsters than I can ever be, they expect this level of stupidity while I'm surprised.

The problem is, globally you cannot know before is this a premium number or not for some random provider in some random country, so what happens is you send the sms and then bill the number.

If my provider can prevent me I'm sure the tech companies with millions in funding can figure it out. Block anything that doesn't comply. I figured this was solved, aren't there SaaS companies with deals all over the world for texts already? If not there's an opportunity. I'm sure it's cheaper than $60M to have full-time employees vet the numbers and new providers showing up.

Did you not click parent link to this thread?

Twilio (the main SaaS company that does this) doesn't have a good solution here

Looking in that parent link it looks like they do, but it's not a default setting

https://www.twilio.com/blog/2015/08/introducing-max-price.ht...

> Telco companies allow people to set up numbers which cost money to send an SMS to.

That's cleary being an accomplice.

That's like a business that sells a service of smashing windows of any car that drives by your home.

That's how you bought ringtones back in the day. It's still how you donate money to Unicef.

I suppose that Twitter has to pay each time a SMS is sent (ar at least, they pay according to the amount of SMS generated), so the bots pump that amount?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com