Account verification Yelp style, how is it more “secure” than traditional verification?

Question

For business owners to "take control" of their business page on Yelp, they register for it.

The Yelp system performs a telephone call-back. From watching to the video here, it sounds like a telephone version of what we all typically do - e-mail check.

For e-mail check, it basically goes like this:

User registers > verify e-mail sent > they click link inside verify e-mail > site verifies

Here's Yelp's:

User registers > verify screen shown with code > Yelp calls user > user enters code > site verifies

It's essentially the same thing, via phone. Is there any reason you can see why this method is better than the e-mail method?

Update: I assumed the reason Yelp called was to make sure the person registering was indeed the owner of the business. But watching the video, that isn't the case. It looks like typical validation - telephone style.

Answer 1

Because you can create fake email accounts that are hard to trace, while it's significantly harder to have a phone # that is fake/untraceable (doable but orders of magnitude less so)

Answer 2

I know I'm a bit late to the game I think the key point is Yelp calls the phone number they already have for the business.

So in order to get around that, you'd either need to have access to that businesses telephone at the time of the validation call, or, edit the phone number with your own, get it approved somehow then go through the validation check.

I've always wondered what a business owner does if the phone number listed isn't correct.