[vijayp]

Yeah, I could believe that it would create too many false positives and in retrospect things do often seem easy.

Google and other service providers do have data to evaluate the benefit and cost of making decisions based on patterns, and they probably do.

[x0x0]

But the benefits are to them and the costs are to us =P

That said, I have no idea how to do account recovery if you cannot trust the phone number.