Plenty of civic minded people find services like these useful for registering Signal accounts not tied to their own number. Or for scraping sites like LinkedIn. There are companies like this run from other countries if you don’t trust Hong Kong. I don’t think arguing that some unknowable fraction of fraud traffic flows through these devices is persuasive when the legislative conversation in the countries that banned these devices is almost entirely about carriers losing some termination fees and national security fears.
In the UK we can still get anonymous SIM cards for cash, if you want an anonymous Signal account.
Having recently looked at commercial SMS gateway pricing, I am inclined to the argument that these devices have a role in thwarting rent-seeking on the part of telcos.
I mean it literally advertises itself as a service that enables people to make money by bypassing restrictions that require phone numbers.
You might not make money using it and instead just use it to sign up for a single signal account, but you’re not really the target audience in that case.
The people making money from it wouldn’t exist without people buying the verification codes. If you Google smspva or services like it and read forum posts about it the majority of discussion is about people using it to automate account registration.
Sorry, I misread your previous comment. The site doesn’t advertise itself as a way to make money, its just incidental to how some people make money. Is scraping a malicious purpose? Maybe in some cases. Either way I don’t see why this use of sim boxes shouldn’t be a civil dispute between companies and needs to be something the government should criminalize. Fraud is already illegal.
> The smspva website has been operating since 2013. During this time, we have gathered a large audience of users who trust us and earn money using our service
And the use case they showcase involves mass creating Facebook pages. Come on. Are you really truly that naive?
It’s vaguely legitimate business that just happens to offer a service that’s super useful to a particular type of clientele. Just like bulletproof hosting.
Is that supposed to always be bad? Unless the pages are used to promote some kind of fraud I don't think that's illegal. It's "dual use" like any other kind of anonymity technology. Cloudflare says 90% of Tor traffic is malicious - does that mean hosting relays and using Tor should be criminalized?
Regardless, that was just a minor point about one potential use of SIM farms. The proposal says they intend to make possession a criminal offence and they don't even have data on whether these devices are used for fraud at scale in the UK.
If you go around selling micro sized mobile phones close to a prison then you can plead all you want that it’s not fraudulent, it’s just for people with tiny hands and it’s ridiculous to imply that it’s anything other than a legitimate business.
However, it’s not. It’s got one clear use case and one clear market.
We started this discussion on sim farms and your very first point here (and in other places in this post) linked directly to the kind of thing that should, and hopefully will, be criminalised in the UK.
Because it’s quite obvious what it really is, even if you apparently can’t see it?
Scraping services that require phone verified accounts but reject VOIP numbers. Someone (in house or a service like smspva) operating SIM farm would be required in order to do this economically.
that's the first time I heard about creating fake verified accounts to scrape. I wonder how profitable that is compared to the obvious malicious use cases like astroturfing/spamming
