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Twilio’s toll fraud problem

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Re: Twilio’s toll fraud problem

#91

Post by startledmarmot »

mxuribe wrote: post #20
tobinfekkes wrote: post #8

I loved Twilio many years ago, but they've become the new Google/SendGrid/Shopify/Stripe/Uber/(soon to add CloudFlare). They retain the right to any/all the upside of any risk/scale, and you retain the obligation in any downside. No questions. It's despicable.

Same here! So, i wonder then, who would be a viable alternative to Twilio?

Hey! I'd naturally recommend SignalWire (as one of the founders over there.)

We have a full messaging + voice + video APIs, including a Twilio-compatible API just for people who need to switch. We're backed by companies like Deutsche Telekom, T-Mobile, and Samsung so we know how to make telecom infra!

https://signalwire.com/products/cloud-messaging

We're also the folks behind the open-source FreeSWITCH framework that powers companies like Bandwidth, Five9, Dialpad, Zoom Voice... maybe even your own company's PBX!

https://freeswitch.com

Re: Twilio’s toll fraud problem

#93

Post by ThePowerOfFuet »

csunbird wrote: post #83
Scoundreller wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favourite was getting charged for an sms my iPhone sent which was a phone home to an Apple headquarters short code for iMessage. iOS hides these from the user. Most providers don’t charge for this, but some do. Really sucks when you carefully load 10 EUR of credit to buy a 10 EUR prepaid plan for the month and see 0,05 deducted despite being incredibly careful to not do anything that would incur a charge before bu…

Apple DOES say that, when you set up FaceTime and iMessage! There is a pop up that says "Your carrier may charge for the messages used to activate iMessage and Facetime" You can choose to not activate and do it later.

That warning did not appear in the early days.

Re: Twilio’s toll fraud problem

#94

Post by EGreg »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #3

The idea that you can contact a phone number without any idea how much it will cost in 2023 is crazy. At the least, there should be a list of phone numbers known to not result in surprise charges so you can block all others.

It gets better. An Ethereum address can receive any tokens, including NFTs, and has no power to reject them. A famous celebrity can have a lot of NFT spam publicly visible in their accounts, and people have no idea if they bought them or not!

Re: Twilio’s toll fraud problem

#95

Post by ricardo81 »

globalreset wrote: post #39
from wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends what you mean by "premium rate." Every number costs money to call in Twilio. Some numbers cost more, in lots of these frauds numbers in ordinary ranges are used (Is a rural number in Chile that costs $0.20/minute to call premium rate/fraud? Because that's what it looks like a lot of the time. How about $0.05 a minute in Austria?). IRSF, the industry term for this kind of fraud causes billions in losses a year…

Block any number that costs more than 25th percentile would be a start and so on... I can come up with plenty of heuristics that would be better than nothing.

Yes, or let the user define a max cost

Re: Twilio’s toll fraud problem

#96

Post by csharpminor »

CaveTech wrote: post #49

We've been hit by this exact issue, especially over the last month. We tried to mitigate as cleanly as possible for our users, adding one-time nounces to signup requests, adding rate-limiting rules, locking down regions, but we still faced an onslaught of tens of thousands of fraudulent signups per day. On our tier we don't have the ability to set block rules ourselves - it requires a support request that takes 2-3 d…

Just curious because you didn't mention it - have you considered putting a captcha in front of your OTP flow? Are the fraudsters also defeating that?

Re: Twilio’s toll fraud problem

#97

Post by eitau_1 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #87
ender341341 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe on prepaid plans? Been a while since I've heard of SMS costing anything on subscription plan, outside of roaming charges. Mobile Internet effectively cannibalized that income stream for the phone companies.

yea, it's prepaid in Poland. But to be fair, I pay $12 a year for 50GB of data and don't call/text much

Re: Twilio’s toll fraud problem

#98

Post by doodlesdev »

tobinfekkes wrote: post #8

I loved Twilio many years ago, but they've become the new Google/SendGrid/Shopify/Stripe/Uber/(soon to add CloudFlare). They retain the right to any/all the upside of any risk/scale, and you retain the obligation in any downside. No questions. It's despicable.

> SendGrid

Just FYI SendGrid is a Twilio product LOL, so I guess you are right.

Re: Twilio’s toll fraud problem

#100

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

rippercushions wrote: post #65
globalreset wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are 200+ jurisdictions in the phone network and everybody has their own conventions on what a "premium" number is. They know how to charge you for these numbers so apparently they do have that data, no?

Telco billing is postpaid, so they actually won't find out for at least a month.

That's inconsistent with the OP getting 40 emails a day about charges, though?
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