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Twilio’s toll fraud problem

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Re: Twilio’s toll fraud problem

#201

Post by kalleboo »

ender341341 wrote: post #71
eitau_1 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> premium rate number costs 10 cents wut, the absolutely most ordinary (in the realm of single telecom) text costs me ~6.5 cents

Can I ask where? I'm in the US and any of the big carriers offer unlimited texting as a baseline, and we have pretty crappy carriers compared to a lot of the world.

It costs me around 3 cents to send a domestic SMS and 40 cents to send an international one, on an unlimited data 5G plan in Japan.

That said, I don't care, since I literally can not remember the last time I sent an SMS. It must have been years ago.

Re: Twilio’s toll fraud problem

#202

Post by ridgered4 »

from wrote: post #180
ipython wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now if only I could sign one of those premium rate numbers to get robocalled …

Google "international premium rate number" and you can get one in any country for free. Up to $0.7 a minute on some satellite and Albanian numbers if you opt for net 30/45 day payment in some places! This stuff happens everyday - I'm surprised no one has talked about it here till now. It is a very difficult problem to address if you want to accept international users and limit false positives.

I remember reading an article where a guy in the UK set one of these up with a bot like Lenny to make money off the scam calls. It was kind of shocking to me you could just setup any number like that, not just 900 numbers.

Re: Twilio’s toll fraud problem

#203

Post by tripue »

We faced the same problem at Zenly and had to build our own anti-spam strategies to prevent it since Twilio was not taking care of the problem for us. We used multiple providers to improve our conversion rate and reduce cost. We are now building this as a service https://www.ding.live/ and are seeing huge improvements for our first customers in term of cost savings and conversion rate. Feel free to reach out if it could be any interest to you hello@ding.live.

Re: Twilio’s toll fraud problem

#204

Post by ceejayoz »

alwayslikethis wrote: post #181
ceejayoz wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m particularly afraid of it on Amazon, where a $20 dispute could nix my 800+ book Kindle library.

Shouldn't have "bought" them in the first place. Buy physical books, or DRM-free books on sites like gumroad, or just pirate. Don't give in to the rent seeking business of pretending to sell you what you can't own. If you like your Kindle device, you can use KOReader to read epubs and reduce dependence on Amazon. If I sue the bookstore, they can't just take all the books away, but if you dispute a charge with Amazon,…

> Buy physical books

No.

> DRM-free books on sites like gumroad

I like specific authors.

> or just pirate

I like specific authors and want them to get paid.

Re: Twilio’s toll fraud problem

#205

Post by lfodofod »

dmurray wrote: post #196
from wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're conflating toll bypass fraud with IRSF. A grey route that never delivered any calls or only a fraction of them would have bad ACD numbers and people would not use that route. With hacked Asterisk/FreePBX boxes people usually call the international numbers described in OP and split the termination fee with some corrupt carrier/intermediary. There is a related fraud where people use the hacked Asterisk/F…

> Traditional toll bypass fraud is when countries are expensive to call internationally but have cheap local calls, so people in those countries buy a bunch of sim cards, put them in a box with a bunch of gsm modems, and use those to basically "convert" an expensive international call to a cheap local call (and profit the difference between the two rates). Is this really fraud? Is it fraud to offer any VOIP service,…

Fraud is what the government decides it is, the governments have deemed this to be fraud.

Telecom companies don’t necessarily care about this, it’s often the governments who want to tax incoming international calls as an easy revenue source.

Re: Twilio’s toll fraud problem

#206

Post by Terretta »

Brystephor wrote: post #193
Terretta wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Further, the customer has the right to dispute credit card charges thanks to the agreement between customer and card provider and between card provider and merchant . Twilio will get in trouble with Visa/Mastercard if customers say Twilio is dropping them for disputes the card provider finds in the customers' favor.

> Twilio will get in trouble with Visa/Mastercard if customers say Twilio is dropping them for disputes the card provider finds in the customers' favor. This isn't true. Visa/Mastercard care about your chargeback rate. You can block a customer who's done a chargeback. I'm sure the card networks have rules around what you cannot do as a result of a chargeback but you can stop providing services to a customer who has d…

Disclosure: I engineered and delivered a high risk payment processing gateway to a firm specializing in being a cc processor of last resort, also working with merchant banks of last resort.

To be clear, my views on this are not legal counsel, they are simply from having worked in this area for a decade before becoming CTO at a global bank.

Re: Twilio’s toll fraud problem

#207

Post by from »

dmurray wrote: post #196
from wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're conflating toll bypass fraud with IRSF. A grey route that never delivered any calls or only a fraction of them would have bad ACD numbers and people would not use that route. With hacked Asterisk/FreePBX boxes people usually call the international numbers described in OP and split the termination fee with some corrupt carrier/intermediary. There is a related fraud where people use the hacked Asterisk/F…

> Traditional toll bypass fraud is when countries are expensive to call internationally but have cheap local calls, so people in those countries buy a bunch of sim cards, put them in a box with a bunch of gsm modems, and use those to basically "convert" an expensive international call to a cheap local call (and profit the difference between the two rates). Is this really fraud? Is it fraud to offer any VOIP service,…

I consider it to be relatively harmless but how it is classified depends on the country. India is pretty cheap to call even absent simboxes but they still crack down on the practice for “national security reasons” because it makes tracking people more difficult. The UK (Ofcom) banned them outright for some reason a long time ago but that’s being appealed. In some African countries the laws are pretty vague and do not outright ban them, usually they charge people with “unregistered telecommunications business” or something like that.

Re: Twilio’s toll fraud problem

#208

Post by inetknght »

ceejayoz wrote: post #204
alwayslikethis wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shouldn't have "bought" them in the first place. Buy physical books, or DRM-free books on sites like gumroad, or just pirate. Don't give in to the rent seeking business of pretending to sell you what you can't own. If you like your Kindle device, you can use KOReader to read epubs and reduce dependence on Amazon. If I sue the bookstore, they can't just take all the books away, but if you dispute a charge with Amazon,…

> Buy physical books No. > DRM-free books on sites like gumroad I like specific authors. > or just pirate I like specific authors and want them to get paid .

> I like specific authors and want them to get paid.

Rent the book on Amazon as you already are. But then download a DRM-free copy from somewhere, uhhh, free.

Re: Twilio’s toll fraud problem

#209

Post by inetknght »

AlphaWeaver wrote: post #146

I used to work on toll fraud as part of IT for a large tech organization. Not FAANG but several thousand employees. My impression at the time was the fraud detection heuristics helped, but the root cause was scammers working with telcos overseas. Many of these companies have extremely high rates in the first place, and turn a blind eye to the practice because it makes them much of their money. Some VoIP providers lik…

> Many of these companies have extremely high rates in the first place, and turn a blind eye to the practice because it makes them much of their money

Not a telco but loosely related... I will never forget the day I was working for MediaFire (~2013) and complained directly to the CFO about advertisements on the website that directly violated the advertisement policy. CFO stated that "they paid us a lot of money" and that he's late for a ping pong match then walked out of my office. Well, they might have paid the company a lot of money but I was directly not paid a lot of money and was very much burned from friends for working with scum.

Suffice to say that people in positions to do things about it should be much less forgiving about it.

Re: Twilio’s toll fraud problem

#210

Post by francislavoie »

dima_vm wrote: post #22
Natsu wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd think they'd have an option simply not to let you connect to those toll numbers at all.

They do: https://www.twilio.com/blog/2015/08/introducing-max-price.ht...

Do you happen to know which MaxPrice number would make sense for simple SMS? Figuring it out a reasonable value to use from Twilio's pricing pages is proving quite tricky, because of the amount of dimensions to their pricing.
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