Especially in a world of number portability where you can't just say "oh, that's an old number, it must be POTS".
But I guess, here, if a number is from your contact list, it may still be POTS.
But at least you have higher assurance that it's an active user. If you wardial one day, you quickly find out how many numbers never lead to a human for various reasons. In theory, some of these are trap numbers and quickly flag the caller as suspicious, but I doubt it.
This isn't difficult - I wrote a shell script named "lookup" that will give me background info for any phone number I feed it and tell me what kind of number it is, what carrier it is, who it belongs to, etc.:
# lookup 415-333-2222
{"caller_name": {"caller_name": "WIRELESS CALLER", "caller_type": null, "error_code": null}, "country_code": "US", "phone_number": "+14153332222", "national_format": "(415) 333-2222", "carrier": {"mobile_country_code": "311", "mobile_network_code": "489", "name": "Verizon Wireless", "type": "mobile", "error_code": null}, "add_ons": null, "url": "https://lookups.twilio.com/v1/PhoneNumbers/+14153332222?Type=carrier&Type=caller-name"}
... which is very useful since I often send (personal) SMS from the command line and sometimes I need to know if a number can receive it ...I'm not going to paste the entire script here but the meat of it is:
/usr/local/bin/curl -X GET "https://lookups.twilio.com/v1/PhoneNumbers/$number?Type=carrier&Type=caller-name" -u $accountsid:$authtoken
... and each lookup costs a penny or a half a penny or something ... I forget ...https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27549075 ("Sorted Integer Compression")
main = traverse print [1..99999999]
this tweet says it's BS (they validated the japan sample)
A list of 3.8 billion phone numbers that simply exist is useless. The leak would only have value if the numbers were associated with some identifying information.
If it’s really only phone numbers, I wonder if it’s a leak or if someone brute-forced all possible phone numbers against a ClubHouse API that leaked information about whether or not the number existed in their database.
*https://futurezone.at/apps/clubhouse-leakt-38-milliarden-tel...
If this is only a list of numbers and their relative popularity, the best you can do is accusation of adultery (and even in that, you could say that you're "popular" because coworkers also store your numbers).
I refer here to the aspiring salespeople, not the person reporting it. I suspect this list will be available for free on the dark web within a couple of months. Much as I like to collect interesting data this doesn't seem useful.
For that matter, I have to assume that the shadier businesses silently make use of publicly available leaks. The data is just too valuable to ignore depending on your business model.
Genuinely asking.. might be dumb question
If the seller doesn’t get caught due to the purchasing methods and general routine OPSEC, then its just another example of the Fed reliably monetizing everything, meaning there will always be a buyer and everyone should sell more.
For instance in Denmark it is technically illegal to buy stolen goods, even if you genuinely aren’t aware of it being stolen. Im sure this applies to most countries.
I would ask for monero and would not care if the FBI is the buyer. The most they can do is to watch exchanges where monero is exchanged versus dollars or other cryptocoins. Then do this a few times over and start buying goods with those then sell the goods on Amazon/eBay for hard $$$. Small amounts and even with 50 cents at a dollar is still worth it for one person.
Though in Canada, I'm seeing them apply some cloaking measures so they don't get removed as quickly.
I think there's two streams of this:
1. a crooked telecom that has low-level access
2. buy a bunch of SIM cards and dump them into one of these aliexpress machines that has 16 wireless modems in them that let you do whatever you want:
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4000462982086.html
Can even network them to a bank thingy that'll hold 128 cards:
Let’s say you had the ability to do that 1,000x a minute using an automated dialer. Just in the US alone that would take you over a year to complete and how many of those numbers you verified changed active/disconnected status during that time?
(PS, I didn’t downvote you, just pointing out a problem with your theory)