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Business & incomeExperience excerpt · English

I don't mean to do Twilio's work of defending them, but in my experience it's possible they …

… I don't mean to do Twilio's work of defending them, but in my experience it's possible they actually don't know how much to bill the customer. What they may know is the generalized per-minute or per-session rate they've agreed with another operator alongside a general "premium rate numbers will be settled at a later date" kind of clause. My employer got bit by this several years ago, purely on calls within the +1 country code. Before this practice was largely banned, some small carriers were allowed to designate certain rate centers as higher cost. So our VoIP carrier would say that a call to a given area code was $0.003/minute but the calls would later settle out at $0.25/minute because of a 1,000s block of numbers being (unknowing to us our our carrier) as higher cost and being settlement billed back at the higher rate. Twilio could agree to carry some or all of this risk for its customers as part of their value-add and fees. …

Original discussionTwilio’s toll fraud problem214 source comments · at import
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NF

Solving this is squarely Twilio's business! They know how much to bill the customer, so they must know how much it costs to send to a number.

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BO

This is the case, the telephone billing system is perhaps the most complicated pile of softwareshit you have ever seen in your LIFE - and some of it is insane. There have been people who got printed bills from their cell phone provider for every single kilobyte of data, each individually indexed and billed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/300-page_iPhone_bill

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FE

Is it banned? Isn't this part of how FreeConferenceCall works with IIRC dial in numbers on a little LEC somewhere in Iowa?

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RI

Fun fact: +1 is not a country, but all of North America. For a long time it was entirely possible to dial a perfectly ordinary looking +1 258 xxxxxxx number and get charged up the wazoo because (258) is Antigua and Barbuda, not New Jersey.

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NF

Surely they can aggregate this across all customers though. If Twilio cops an unexpectedly high settlement for sending an SMS to +1234567890 in January, can they assume that a separate customer sending an SMS to that number in February will end up in the same boat? I'd be very surprised if the toll fraudsters weren't using the same numbers to hit multiple Twilio accounts.

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