HN Explorer

Should I sue Twilio for being a proxy for the relentless fraud calls I get?

6 points by morphicpro ↗ HN
I'm legit getting no less than 3 scams calls a day now for fake Social Security officers. I'm 100% sure they are using twilio as a service to so. It's time someone does something about it. I've seen the videos of the guy DDOS calling these people back via Twilio, but that just lines of pockets of the enablers. What it will really take is accountability of the enablers.

11 comments

[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 39.7 ms ] thread
uberman
That stinks. Just out of curiosity how can you tell what service they are using?
morphicpro
Its very possible I'm wrong. I just know that its a favorite based on the ease of use "pre paid credit cards" and the wide phone number exchange twilio provides so that they can keep swapping out with new number. Granted it could be something similar to twilio, I only pick them out since they are the top service currently and the probability they are using their services are high.
quit32
Twilio's own lookup API will tell you if they are the carrier with I assume pretty good accuracy. It works on the number I own with Twilio.

Some of the political texts I get show twilio as carrier. Calls tend to be Onvoy which is now Inteliquent I believe.

Will also show who the carrier is believed to be if not them.

https://www.twilio.com/docs/lookup/tutorials/carrier-and-cal...

morphicpro
Thank you for the info, I will use this to confirm my findings.
morphicpro
Dang, not very useful

{"mobile_country_code":null,"mobile_network_code":null,"name":null,"type":null,"error_code":60600}

quit32
Ahh sorry I forgot I'm using the Twilio ekata_reverse_phone addon that you can get in twilio marketplace so I have carrier info in the lookup response.

I guess then whether it is 100% on Twilio being the carrier is a little less likely but I tested a few more twilio numbers I know and they all returned with Twilio as carrier.

laptop-man
if you waste their time they will stop. pretend to be old and do everything slowly, make them repeat themselves. collectively I waster a few hours of their time over a month. they stopped calling
quit32
You are probably complaining about calls on a cell line but if happens to be landline, I ported one over to Twilio and actually used it to eliminate spam calls by requiring non whitelisted callers to press 2 digits to continue the call. And also saving about 7x compared to AT&T landline cost.

Connected a voip phone to it via programmable SIP.

palidanx
Did you create a special TwilML Bin for this? Would you mind sharing if that's the case?
chrisbennet
I always wanted to say "How did you get the Attorneys Generals personal cell #???"