> But perhaps we should not be surprised by the lack of interest in fraud exhibited by Twitter’s former management. The tech industry in general suffers from a cancerous disposition towards encouraging fake traffic, fake users, and fake online activity because it makes businesses appear to be more successful than they really are. Criminals are fed millions of dollars by executives who think that price is worth paying if it will mislead investors into believing inflated valuations. The presumption is that current losses are also worth sustaining because the business will turn today’s paper valuation into real value at some vaguely-defined point in the future.

That's it. If you can't figure someone's intentions, look at their actions, and infer the intentions.

I can believe fraud was happening.

I have a harder time believing that 390 different telcos were all running the same fraud to the tune of $60 million per year and none of the previous Twitter administration thought to check into it.

This feels like another one of those claims that has a kernel of truth, but gets exaggerated for dramatic effect as a PR move. Like those drug busts that find a small amount of drugs, but then use the entire weight of the container it was found in multiplied by the highest possible street value they can imagine so they can claim a gigantic number in the headlines.

It's really surprising this can go unchecked:

1) it makes the cost of acquiring users artificially high, since its an expense that doesn't lead to a completed signup

2) you'd think the verification process would be monitored anyway, in case of deliverability issues or false negatives on checking the codes - even if not spikey because this was always happening, surely the high baseline 'code requested and never entered' would raise questions?

$60M in fraudulent texts alone is wild. I couldn't imagine being the director responsible for those costs and not having investigated earlier.

Assuming an average sms rate of $0.04, they have sent 1.5 billion messages a year.

2022 stats indicate Twitter had 396.5 Million users. So for the full picture, it would be around 5 messages per user per year, which I don’t see as a large number. This might be why it wasn’t unnoticed.

I remember someone did this on a smaller, individual scale. Billing a company for SMS messages..I think it was Starbucks or something. This was 4 years ago, it was shared here.

I worked for a telco that did SMS and voice, and while we spent time investigating and shutting down various scams and spam, I never saw this one.

Does anyone run a blackhole list for these numbers and operators? (Or a historical phone number -> SMS price mapping?)

In a sane system, no one should pay fees unless they're listed up front. Lacking that, a way to identify and avoid bad actors would be helpful.

Makes more sense anyway why now only Twitter blue accounts can use 2FA

Unfortunately this is a case and proof of the classic kickback scheme that occurs in many corporate companies. Also common in many bureaucratic companies, countries. If you don't think $60M/yr is real, you are in a hell of a seat when you see the billing/accounting that goes in corporates and governments.

This is an interesting article, but I was distracted by the Byzantine ways people write “millions of dollars.” I’ve seen “MM” before, and now “mn”.

Perhaps I’m the only one who is fond of standard prefixes and uses “M$” for millions of dollars.

For those who doubt the old Twitter management could be so incompetent: These are the same people who never noticed they were showing me ads in a language I couldn't understand whenever I went on vacation.

This title needs to be prefixed by “Elon Musk Says.”

Which company does Twitter use to send these SMS messages, Twilio?

Source?

Why is he sitting on some weird video conference for hours just talking at strangers? Is this a thing other CEOs do? Is he lonely?

Really goes to show how poorly run Twitter was from the very beginning. Jack Dorsey probably doing the same thing with Square right now.