Or maybe change the terms of use for the employee line discount to allow monitoring SMS content or metadata for security threats to the companies users?
I haven’t seen much evidence in the past they would.
T-Mobile blocks my Google Voice calls. They have to run inside a VPN.
Their website says it's $99/month. That seems a bit steep to me considering all they're providing over a regular provider that charges $29/month is that they do a bit more verification when you claim that you lost your sim. It's not even clear whether they protect against a port-out attack, which is probably worth worrying about as well.
That, plus the fact that it's a premium service that is mostly only useful to higher net worth / higher income people, makes it seem reasonable that it would be quite expensive relative to a regular provider.
According to the BLS "Computer User Support Specialists" get paid $30 on average[1]. Whatever training they give to staff to resist sim-swap attacks, I can't imagine they can't be more complicated than the certifications that "Computer User Support Specialists" have to get through, so I think it's reasonable to model their support costs at $30/hr per person. With the premium they're charging over a budget MVNO they can afford two support people per customer. How many fraudulent sim swap attacks could the worst client possibly attract? Is it really that hard to train someone to deny sim swaps until they go through 11 steps of verification like their website says?
[1] https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm
>That, plus the fact that it's a premium service that is mostly only useful to higher net worth / higher income people, makes it seem reasonable that it would be quite expensive relative to a regular provider.
I mean yeah that's the more reasonable answer. It's a luxury product and priced accordingly.
It seems like a well-oiled machine.
0: Well, some places don't like using GV for 2FA (and demand a "real" cell phone number), and some other places don't think it can do short-code messages at all, but those aren't issues that anyone at GV could ever solve even if those people did exist.
1: Yeah, sure. I'm the product. Blah blah.
I've still got my .10 Grand Central introductory credit.
Because you can port a landline to Google Voice for $20, and, in my experience, random Internet "phone number lookup" sites still show it as a landline years later.
Is it the most convenient thing ever? No. I have an older iPhone because I'm a cheap bastard so I turn off the other line when I'm not using it, otherwise it will constantly look for a compatible roaming signal which it will never find because I have not authorized any international charges on that account (battery drain).
Some may call, most not even that.
My bank accounts at banks I like have never complained about my Google Voice number and still don't. My bank account at Bank of America had some security check I needed to complete at some point and my Google Voice number that had been in their system for a decade I was told was not eligible anymore and I needed to actually use my real phone number.
I could almost put up with it if it was for things that need to be secure, but my 7-11 rewards account rejected my phone number at the gas pump a few years ago and Target rewards also started blocking my GV number.
"I have cheerfully been using your service in this exact same way for seventeen years."
"FUCK YOU! GET OUT!"
There was a time many years ago when Google Voice would intermittently fail to ring or even forward calls to another number when I tried that, and then give no indication that a call was ever made to your number that you missed (I verified it by asking when people I knew called me and said I never got back to them), which is pretty bad when you're expecting to receive important calls sometimes. This went on for months. I received bare minimum support which didn't even come close to helping the issue even though my issue was voted to the top of the support boards because many other people were having the same issue at the time. I'm glad you personally haven't had an issue but you should be prepared to have one at some point and get essentially no help.
No human to talk to, no appeals process. Don't trust Google, they are indifferent.
I feel like it should be required reading to protect against "automate all the things" hubris.
Google Plus failed for many reasons but I doubt that one was a big factor.
God forbid I chargeback a purchase on Google Pay (or whatever their PayPal is this year) and trip some anti-fraud system that locks me out of my 20 year old email account. We all know their support is either automated or nonexistent, so it’s not worth the risk.
And you effectively can't even run your own system, as has been discussed here many times.
Pretty much just an apple thing as far as I can see.
It's probably a tiny chance it happens to many people but it's something to consider. I had nobody to talk to. No store to go to. I lost cell service for a week until I migrated everything off of google.
Just something to be wary of.
edit: I tried to dig it up it's about a year old and .. oof yeah i'm not going through pages and pages of paginated yn comments. Moral of the story is what I said above
This one seems to fit. Happy I've never had reason to write one like it.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1700092800&dateRange=custom&...
This is less traumatizing than when I found irclogs of me from 10-14 thankfully.
A well paid attorney worth their salt will likely tell you that you don't want to test that theory with a court and the various employment watchdogs.
Engaging in such a plan and through happenstance and human fallibility ending up actually creating harm to an actual customer could potentially expose you to a tort claim.
We call it concentration camp here. Because of all the thinking.
I don't see a big difference between this, and sending fake phishing emails to employees to see if they bite, which is a fairly common practice.
In this case though, it doesn't necessarily have to be T-mobile that does it. It could be local law enforcement, and they could potentially trade immunity for information on real bribers.
Likewise, CEO can not instruct the accountant to steal money from company account as a test.
1. require two employees PLUS an agent on the phone to do it.
2. call the desired number and speak to whoever answers and ask if they're aware the number will be ported
3. have a 24-hour period to try to reach someone at that number before the swap occurs.
4. Offer a very large bounty ($10,000 or more) for providing evidence that a co-worker is taking bribes
I'll have to google a bit and see if they are restricted.
T-Mobile’s New SIM Protection https://tmo.report/2022/12/t-mobiles-new-sim-protection-is-n...
Honestly what the OP suggested is simply a sting operation.
Your reaction to it is ... more scary.
Until it is.
> It’s no better than selling a gun to a person you know intends to use it to commit a crime.
Though I guess you could be making the case that crime is a legitimate use of guns?
To be clear, my original post only pointed out that what you said is a non sequitur:
> It’s no better than selling a gun to a person you know intends to use it to commit a crime.
> > Just so we’re clear: getting shot is quite a bit worse than having your phone number stolen.
If your phone number being stolen causes your savings to get drained for long enough that you run into problems making important payments like rent, taxes, car payments; That can pretty quickly spiral into even worse situations. In a world/country where many people have too few savings to go even a month without being paid, losing even that can get extremely dangerous. Not to mention the stress of such a situation alone will probably take quite a bit of your life expectancy off.
At least in the United States, we also live in a society where the financial ramifications of getting shot could lead to equally bad financial outcomes (whether directly or indirectly).
I don't think I have much sympathy if you lose your job for doing something this damaging and probably illegal.
SIM swapping? No comment. Trying to catch SIM swappers? Suddenly you have feelings about it!
You can make $15/hr as an entry-level cashier - your first job, zero job history - at CVS and Walgreens, with tolerable health/dental/eye insurance.
And if you're not entirely braindead you can trivially become a pharmacy intern (then tech) and start at $18-$20, with benefits. They'll pay for your licensing. You can make $18-$22 to start as a telemetry or video tech, with zero experience. Hospitals are filled with people sitting in rooms watching video monitors making sure patients don't fall over or hurt themselves, it pays 3x the minimum wage and requires zero experience.
If you're making $7.50 /hr at this point, you're either living somewhere very barren (almost zero economic opportunities), or it's your own fault.
Even so, retail sales jobs are often heavily commission adjusted which makes this not so cut and dry.
Sell sell sell, or you are well below the poverty line and quickly replaced by someone more willing to cut corners on the activities that are not profitable like carefully checking ID.
Almost nobody makes federal minimum wage.
It's gotta be at 2%+ making state minimum wage though.
CA for example has a minimum wage somewhere north of $15, and like 10% of the population makes minimum wage or less. That right there pulls the number for the whole country up to at least 1% making minimum wage, because CA is >10% of the population. (Extreme example, since CA also has the highest real poverty rate in the US (SPM, not the hilariously undercounting OPM)).
“And give them a home / a little place of their own…”
And Matt Levine every now and then talks about a guy making a few million a year insider insider trading a few thousand and settling.