Nothing will stop you from taking over that account. So if you’ve got a new phone number recently, you could check whether its previous owner has a Yahoo! or AOL account. Yet here we still are: anybody can take over a Yahoo! or AOL account as long as they control the recovery phone number associated with it. For example, Brian Krebs mentioned this a year ago. I’m not even the first one to write about this issue. Surprise, I logged in ACCIDENTALLY to the Yahoo! mail of the previous owner of my current phone number!!! So I did that, and typed in the access key… I entered my phone number to the Yahoo! login, and it asked me if I wanted to receive a verification key/access key (2fa authentication).
I’m not the one who discovered the issue.
