There's a reason why the most famous confidence tricks have names that go back hundreds of years (eg, spanish prisoner) and there's fun named people like Soapy Smith that mastered things like mock auctions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soapy_Smith or "Kid Dropper" named after his love of the "drop swindle" scam: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan_Kaplan
The idea that we need to "lockdown" things because we live in unprecedented times relies on someone not really reading any history. Things are relatively pretty safe these days.
The fact that these risks existed a century ago is a poor argument for suggesting they shouldn't be taken seriously in the present.
We live in an era where things can be done instantly online with sufficient information. A sophisticated conman from the 1800's can now execute fraud in seconds instead of plotting for weeks, and they can do so in an automated fashion. The risk isn't anywhere near the same.
A white pages phone book hooked up to pay phone is bound to the region in which it is distributed. A bug on a website that links phone number to full name is exposed on a global scale. Not to mention, a landline number is not anything like a mobile phone number, which is a unique identifier to tons of PII.
Right but if I presented this problem to you without using the word "phone" I'm pretty sure the answer would be "throttle and rate limit" and ban for abuse, not kill off the feature.
These lists are still available for purchase and thus they are still available. I'm not a criminal so I don't know what websites to go to but I'd be shocked if a file with a name like "US-ATT-SUBSCRIBERS-2020-12.sql.gz" doesn't exist.
As an example, my friends pool together as a "family plan" and we get a discount. I frequently get texts and calls from people asking for the person who pays the account. I don't use their name in anything I sign up for and they don't use my number. We don't even live at the same address - the phone bill is literally the only paper trail that connects us.
Therefore, the only way this mistake is possible is if these marketers bought the subscriber list or found a copy online somewhere.
In the 1800s a famous fraudster invented an entirely fictitious country and then sold fraudulent land grants and bonds for it - really, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregor_MacGregor
There's a reason why the most famous confidence tricks have names that go back hundreds of years (eg, spanish prisoner) and there's fun named people like Soapy Smith that mastered things like mock auctions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soapy_Smith or "Kid Dropper" named after his love of the "drop swindle" scam: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan_Kaplan
Charles Ponzi did his stuff 100 years ago and he just lifted it from earlier con artists like Adele Spitzeder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adele_Spitzeder
The idea that we need to "lockdown" things because we live in unprecedented times relies on someone not really reading any history. Things are relatively pretty safe these days.