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Ask HN: Twilio suspended account because someone sent us a fraud text

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Re: Ask HN: Twilio suspended account because someone sent us a fraud text

#141

Post by foota »

jdavis703 wrote: post #73
vorpalhex wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have set up a few twilio accounts like this where a business number blindly forwards to the business owner's personal cell, maybe some logic for business hours and holidays. If twilio wants us to start filtering spam messages for these cases, they need to give us the API/tooling. Or let us pre-register receiving numbers through an opt-in process. I understand Twilio not wanting to be an open relay but the reported…

If someone has already written a custom integration, how hard can it be to wire it up to a spam detection API? It sounds like the integration was sending spam (not intentionally of course), which none the less is a TOS violation. If they can’t update the integration with spam filtering, then it seems like they should be using COTS software.

Is sending an employee a message they've elected to receive ever spam in some sense? If the reflection were to an arbitrary number then I'd say so, but simply forwarding to a specific number you're working with seems... Fine. Maybe it's different too if it's a solution you're selling, but even then that's somewhat between you and the customer.

I guess if twilio has negative impacts as a result of the perceived spam then that's a separate issue.

Re: Ask HN: Twilio suspended account because someone sent us a fraud text

#142

Post by ChrisDutrow »

SkeuomorphicBee wrote: post #134
ChrisDutrow wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think one of the key contexts here is being forgotten: These are all internal messages. Someone cannot use our system to text random people. It's literally one person seeing them. We're a local service company. We're not SAAS or something like that. It's just people messaging us "Hey can you guys come Thursday?" This would be like if you signed up for a VOIP provider for your business phones and they suspended your…

With due respect, you are the one ignoring key context: From the employee's carrier perspective those are external messages originating from you. All that Verizon/T-Mobile/at&t see is spam coming from you, they don't know about the employer/employee relation. So when those carries complain to your carrier, your carrier has little options but to lock you.

Ok so are you saying that Twilio cannot be used to rely messages from company phone numbers to employee cells phones?

I would understand if this was an edge case, but my understanding is this is a quite common and a core use case. I'm pretty sure this exact use case is in their basic tutorial.

Re: Ask HN: Twilio suspended account because someone sent us a fraud text

#143

Post by ChrisDutrow »

desmosxxx wrote: post #109
helloworld11 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that this particular customer was only able to get a "friendly" human resolution for this by first posting about his problem on a tech-heavy social media platform like HN speaks very poorly about your company's customer service. I know that the giants like Google, Facebook et al shit all over their users now that they're large, but it would be nice to believe that it hasn't turned into a fad even among small…

Even employees of those companies can't get help when they need it. I've seen a case where an employee's account was incorrectly banned (or well that was their assumption) and they still couldn't get through to any of the teams. It's getting pretty rediculous

I read something about how Amazon was accidentally firing people in their warehouses due to an automated system. And the HR people in the warehouse didn't have the power to override it.

Re: Ask HN: Twilio suspended account because someone sent us a fraud text

#144

Post by ChrisDutrow »

techsupporter wrote: post #92
_hyn3 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wonder if it runs on Twilio..

I don't know what the SMS service part of Pushover uses as we don't send SMS through Pushover. The part we use, the main feature, sends a notification through an app the user installs on their device. All of us who receive push notifications through our system have the Pushover app on our phones, some also have it on their tablets and computers. I like the Apple Watch integration as I can interact with urgent notific…

Oh I didn't even realize they had SMS. I was just thinking I could use push messages instead of SMS.

Re: Ask HN: Twilio suspended account because someone sent us a fraud text

#145

Post by ChrisDutrow »

djyaz1200 wrote: post #118

We were paying them around $1500/mo and had a similar issue where they blocked some (in our case) legitimate messaging traffic. We switched most of our traffic to another provider and are pleased. We had been a Twilio customer since 3 days after they launched and I owned a significant amount of their stock. I sold it all when this happened in spring of last year and I'm glad I did... stock has gone down significantly…

Which provider did you end up using?

Re: Ask HN: Twilio suspended account because someone sent us a fraud text

#146

Post by quadrifoliate »

ChrisDutrow wrote: post #131
quadrifoliate wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A request from a random HNer – could you also commit to observing what the user's interactions with your customer service have been so far; and improving each of those, instead of nebulously "escalating" (where people will unblock an account because the CEO mandated it from up on high)? Otherwise, you are contributing to a pattern where HN becomes de facto Tier 1 Customer Service, similar to how Twitter was a few yea…

I'm going to have to cop to this. I was desperate and needed a way to get my phone calls up and running. I have many employees that rely on me to feed their families. We employ a lot of refugees with large families and if I don't run my business right, they can't feed their families. This isn't a game. I posted to HackerNews because I suspected my issue would be seen and taken seriously if I did that. I could tell th…

I totally understand your point of view, and you are not at fault at all. Anyone with a small business who's faced with the faceless, understaffed customer service at modern web companies would have done the same thing. I hope your issue gets resolved quickly.

IMO now that Twilio is a public company, they should be investing in better customer service. I am simply encouraging them to solve the actual problem in addition to unblocking you; hence the "also commit to...", not "instead commit to..."

I hope my comment is not used as justification to not solve your problem. That would be the very last thing I want.

Re: Ask HN: Twilio suspended account because someone sent us a fraud text

#147

Post by lamontcg »

The only real solution for this is going to be the government stepping in and ordered the carriers to fix their fraud and abuse issues.

They're trying to offload the problem onto Twilio which then winds up passing that onto their customers.

Of course solving the abuse problem means spending money to cut off the revenue they actually see from the scammers sending texts. They'll never be incentivized to do anything about it unless the government were to make them an offer that they couldn't refuse.

That'll never happen though because the government is bought off by corporate lobbyists, so we will continue to evolve into more and more of a third world scam economy.

Re: Ask HN: Twilio suspended account because someone sent us a fraud text

#148

Post by ChrisDutrow »

rubatuga wrote: post #81

Seems like it’s his fault. I’m currently using the twilio API. A simple Python script could be used to filter out any messages that weren’t sent from an employee. He essentially has an unauthenticated open relay, a one way ticket to get put on a spam blacklist in the SMTP world.

It's not an unauthenticated open relay.

It's like if you had a restaurant and you wanted to use Twilio. You might forward text messages sent to the restaurant number hosted on Twilio to your personal cell phone number.

Re: Ask HN: Twilio suspended account because someone sent us a fraud text

#149

Post by Xylakant »

ihumanable wrote: post #108
Xylakant wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twilio could fairly easily verify that the phone number owner consents: when setting up the recipient number, allow for double opt in - send a verification code that must be entered somewhere.

I worked at Twilio for 6 years, the carriers would never allow the thing you are asking for. Twilio outbounds the SMS message over the carrier network. Part of that relationship is that Twilio has to prevent spam from entering the carrier network, or the carriers will ban the interconnect. Here's the full workflow of this situation. The inbound leg looks like this. [Spammer] -SMS-> [Carrier] -SMS-> [Twilio] -HTTP-> […

But twilio happily accepts spam - at least according to the OP. The message flow according to the post is Spammer -> SMS -> Twilio -> Forward by Customer -> SMS -> Customers own number. So the correct place to check would be on the incoming leg.

Re: Ask HN: Twilio suspended account because someone sent us a fraud text

#150

Post by ChrisDutrow »

Fatnino wrote: post #77
ChrisDutrow wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes or they could have just blocked the messaged before it hit my system. They are the ones that originally allowed the message to get to me. Then when I process it, they suspend my account.

Perhaps your employee's cell carrier detected the message as spam and automatically complained to what it saw as the source (twillio). From twillio's point of view they absolutely and unequivocally need to keep the carriers happy. If Att or Vzw simply blocks all twillio then twillio is dead. When faced with the choice of losing the entire company or losing your $600 a month it's pretty obvious why twillio has in plac…

I'd be really curious to know if this is what happened. Whats more interesting is he lives in Spain and his cell phone is on a Spanish carrier.

I also understand and agree with your argument about why they might have done what they did. But I still needed to counter with what I did in order to protect my business.

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