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Comment on Euro cops take down cybercrime network with 49M fake accounts

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These burner phone numbers not exclusively used by criminals, a privacy-minded person would use those to make accounts on services that require a phone number (and sadly, it feels like there's a lot of these lately)

If you look at these companies it's never aimed at the privacy enthusiast use case. They are aiming for mass-sms outreach, anti-bot measures and sell them in bundles of 1000s.

Instead of requiring a phone number, accept a small amount ($1-2) in cryptocurrency. You can charge extra if the user sends too many DMs or gives too many likes. Perfect solution against spammers.

However, personal information costs much more than $2, so the companies will continue to demand a phone number. Mobile OS developers even developed a format for automatically transferring SMS OTP to a website to help scammy companies.

Requiring a user to use cryptocurrency sounds like a great way to not have a lot of users.

Mass SMS is illegal on the part of the sender, not any intermediary services. Anti-anti-bot is a good thing since anti-bot is destroying the internet.

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