Reputation for phone numbers? Sounds like a good idea.
I want my reputation to be "Never answers unrecognized numbers and never buys anything over the phone ever, so don't even try".
Give me the most deadbeat phone number rating, please.
I want my reputation to be "Never answers unrecognized numbers and never buys anything over the phone ever, so don't even try".
Give me the most deadbeat phone number rating, please.
To put the shoe on the other foot, if you wanted to create a startup that offered anonymizing VPNs to privacy-conscious techies, and offer a free trial, you'd have a spam/scam problem. That site would be very attractive to a large number of people wanting to do illegal things with it. You could filter a lot of them out by requiring a phone number on signup, verifying ownership of that number, and rejecting registration from any with a low reputation score. People using burner VOIP numbers or the same number to make accounts reported as fraudulent at other businesses would have a low score.
You probably don't want to have a bad reputation if you care about signing up for things online. Like they said, Telesign has a huge number of clients. Lots of other fraud detection systems, like MaxMind's which are recommended occasionally on HN, are built on top of Telesign's APIs as well.