SMS Pumping: How Criminals Turn Your Messaging Service into Their Cash Machine

This report analyzes SMS pumping (artificial inflation of A2P SMS traffic) used by fraudsters and rogue telecom intermediaries to monetize verification flows, detailing mechanics, actors, detection signals, and business impacts; it cites Twitter's reported $60M annual losses and a detected case with 500+ synthetic registrations, and recommends controls including real-time traffic anomaly alerting, bot and API protection, device fingerprinting, and fraud analytics to prevent and mitigate such abuse.