Re:Twilio incident: What Signal users need to know
by Aachen on Monday August 15, 2022 @01:51PM
(#32472955)
I don't see the difference between some Isabelle showing up as someone to accept or deny, or some Isabelle with a "I'm a hot single in your area, click this link" message so I'm sure it's spam.
On Telegram this is rampant, on average probably one person per day. It shifted from e-gold scams to sex since a few months, but both are still present. People that aren't in big groups (where the spammers scrape user IDs) have zero problems, so the trick is revealing your random identifier only to those you want to contact you. Phone number identifiers are the antithesis to spam protection: we keep our ranges just full enough that we can't shorten it by a digit, but empty enough that we have small growth possibilities. You're very likely to hit a subscriber, by design, by trying random numbers.
On Telegram this is rampant, on average probably one person per day. It shifted from e-gold scams to sex since a few months, but both are still present. People that aren't in big groups (where the spammers scrape user IDs) have zero problems, so the trick is revealing your random identifier only to those you want to contact you. Phone number identifiers are the antithesis to spam protection: we keep our ranges just full enough that we can't shorten it by a digit, but empty enough that we have small growth possibilities. You're very likely to hit a subscriber, by design, by trying random numbers.