This makes the assumption that Twitter blocked it due to SMS fraud. While that's a plausible theory an equally plausible theory is that they were worried about account hijacking and security (and allowed twitter blue subscribers to continue to use it on a you can pay me to be stupid context) which seems equally plausible.

I take issue with a lot of the assumptions in the article but this is funny:

> Identify and block premium rate phone numbers, using libphonenumber. Whilst this seems promising, I don’t know how reliable the data and how effective this approach is.

here's this purpose-built and well maintained* library from google which does exactly what I want but i'm not even going to consider it.

* the actual number database has been updated 5x so far this year: https://github.com/google/libphonenumber/commits/master/meta...