Re:Sob story about dead grandma tricks Microsoft AI into sol...
by AnthonyMouse on Monday October 02, 2023 @06:29PM
(#37745318)
The services don't have to use VoIP numbers. Nothing stops them from buying cheap prepaid SIM cards in bulk and putting them in a bank of devices connected to their servers.
Scale here is not the size of the service, it's the number of services that use this verification method. When you have 1000 phone numbers and one service requires this, you can use them to create 1000 accounts on that service. When you have 1000 phone numbers and 100 services do this, you can use them to create 1000 accounts on each of them, i.e. 100,000 accounts. So the value of each number increases but its cost stays the same.
There will no doubt be some cat and mouse game where they try to detect the numbers being used for this and block them, but that's not going to work too well since a prepaid SIM card is cheap and as soon as they're done it with it, it goes back to the carrier to be assigned to an ordinary customer.
Scale here is not the size of the service, it's the number of services that use this verification method. When you have 1000 phone numbers and one service requires this, you can use them to create 1000 accounts on that service. When you have 1000 phone numbers and 100 services do this, you can use them to create 1000 accounts on each of them, i.e. 100,000 accounts. So the value of each number increases but its cost stays the same.
There will no doubt be some cat and mouse game where they try to detect the numbers being used for this and block them, but that's not going to work too well since a prepaid SIM card is cheap and as soon as they're done it with it, it goes back to the carrier to be assigned to an ordinary customer.