I don’t know but he’s making it a more valuable resource. He is letting the spammers charge more for his number when they resell it since it’s verified.

At the same time it also costs them a penny each time I send them one, might just start sending images and costing them more instead.

I’ve also worked with SMS APIs and roughly know the costs from provider to provider.

Hell, I was looking at the spam filter on Messages and accidentally opened one. It was sent as an RCS message and I was worried I’d be flagged and spammed more because of the Read receipt.