TextNow brought on dedicated staff and now has four to five engineers working on fraud at any given time. The company currently has 117 employees, with offices in Waterloo, San Francisco and Seattle, and says it had 14 million active monthly users in January.Īlong the way, the waves of fake accounts forced the company to take fraud prevention seriously.
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The company was also growing, having secured a wholesale deal with Sprint in 2013, which allowed it to offer paid services over the carrier’s wireless network in the United States alongside its regular free calling-and-texting option. To get those, scammers used apps such as Burner and TextNow.Īt the time, TextNow employees were still manually sorting though sign-ups. The key to creating those multiple accounts was unique phone numbers, which Uber requires – then and now – for a new sign-up. By doing so, they racked up ride credits for the referrals. Then they referred themselves through those addresses and made multiple, numerous Uber accounts using stolen credit card numbers. Some enterprising individuals figured out a two-step scheme to take advantage, which inadvertently drew in TextNow and other similar internet calling services.įirst, the users created multiple fake names and e-mail addresses. In 2015, as part of its expansion into China, Uber was handing out free ride credits to users who referred the app to others who weren’t yet signed up. “It was a daily task.”Ī good example of one of these scams is highlighted by The New York Times writer Mike Isaac in his 2019 book Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber, which details the history of the now-ubiquitous ride-hailing app. “That was my night job – scam prevention,” he says. When he went home in the evening, he’d try to identify and manually delete fraudulent sign-ups. By day, he would deal with TextNow’s regular operations. Huntington effectively began working two jobs. In other cases – as in TextNow’s – they result in additional costs and a necessary pivot in mentality.įor his part, the flood of fake accounts meant Mr. In some cases, such developments turn out to be fatal for a business.
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The predicament highlights the often inevitable reality that many technology startups face at some point in their evolution – that eventually, some people somewhere are going to figure out how to use their creations for unintended purposes. And then there’s an immediate realization that you have to do something about it.” “The first time you realize someone is using a product you built for some purpose that you never intended, it’s very disappointing.
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He has been with the company since 2011 and is currently its core product director.
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Huntington says, referring to internal sentiment at the company at the time. “It definitely wasn’t a positive reaction,” Mr. Encouraged by the easy sign-up process, scammers were piling in to grab the free phone number supplied by the app, which they then used for all manner of online schemes. But then the fake accounts came flooding in.
![sign up textnow sign up textnow](https://i2.wp.com/loginwhale.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/textnow-com-login.jpeg)
It was becoming something of a viral hit, attracting thousands of legitimate users.
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Their app let users make calls and send texts for free while connected to WiFi. TextNow had been started two years earlier by Derek Ting and Jon Lerner, two computer engineering students at the University of Waterloo, as a way to get around what they saw as usurious Canadian wireless rates. It was 2011 and their Waterloo, Ont.-based startup was still small, with fewer than 10 employees. Tristan Huntington vividly remembers when he and the rest of his team at TextNow realized their free calling-and-texting app was being abused.