Re:Google disabled my husband's account
by Nextgrid on Thursday October 15, 2020 @10:35PM
(#24796859)
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).
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Perhaps your FBI agent requested Twitter for some help figuring out your true identity.
Re:Google disabled my husband's account
by justinclift on Thursday October 15, 2020 @10:49PM
(#24796930)
Wonder if they've blocked the providers of temporary virtual phone numbers?
Re:Google disabled my husband's account
by Nextgrid on Thursday October 15, 2020 @10:51PM
(#24796949)
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.