A 30% data loss doesn't translate to a 30% revenue hit because ad platforms can't optimize blind. Your conversion API gets starved of signals. Meta's algorithm can't exit the learning phase. Google stops allocating budget effectively. Your retargeting pools shrink. Your LTV calculations become fiction. Bad decisions compound from there.
What gets me is how invisible it all is. The dashboards look fine. The numbers are there. But they're incomplete in exactly the ways that matter the conversions that train your optimization models are missing.
I've talked to agency owners and in-house teams about this. Everyone feels it: the growing disconnect between what they're doing and what the data shows. It's become a quiet frustration across the industry.
The browser wars and privacy laws were inevitable. But the cost of this transition is being borne entirely by businesses operating in the dark. The question now is whether server-side solutions buy us enough time before the blocking arms race catches up.
The FaaS angle is what gets me. They weren't just running a SIMbox farm in a basement they had public websites, API documentation, and were essentially selling "bypass SMS verification as a service" to other criminals globally. That's a business model. That's engineering.
The scale is where it gets sobering. 1,200 SIMbox devices, 40,000 simultaneous SIM cards, 50 million fake accounts. That's not amateur hour. That's logistics, infrastructure, customer support. They'd solved the hard problems: How do you manage hardware at scale? How do you keep 40,000 SIMs operational? How do you make it easy enough that non-technical actors can integrate it into their fraud workflows?
And yeah, the systemic stuff is the real problem. We're all operating under the assumption that "phone verified" means something. It doesn't anymore, apparently. All those metrics everyone relies on user growth, engagement, review scores there's just... noise in there. A lot of noise.
Makes you wonder: for every verification layer we add, is there already a service like this being built to defeat it?