Wholesale glossary
SMS pumping, also called Artificially Inflated Traffic (AIT), is fraud where bots and fake accounts trigger application-to-person messages, typically OTP and verification SMS, toward specific destination ranges, inflating message volume that the sender pays for and a participating carrier or aggregator profits from terminating.
Why it matters
It hit the headlines when Twilio and Elon Musk publicly cited it as a multi-million dollar leak at X, and it has become a board-level topic for any business sending OTPs at scale: ad fraud budgets move to SMS when clicks get audited.
What practitioners watch
Detection lives in the destination pattern: OTP traffic concentrating on obscure number ranges, small operators or suspiciously specific prefixes, with conversion (actual account activations) near zero after the send. Senders: demand per-destination delivery analytics and block unknown premium ranges. Carriers: watch P2P/A2P ratio drift on those corridors.
Related: A2P SMS Bypass Observatory · SMS Wholesale · Grey Route