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Ya, this isn't a dark pattern. IIRC - They did this because they got customer service complaints from customers saying they didn't believe the results because they were used to older systems "sitting there and churning though numbers".

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It's a dark pattern, because it's deliberately wasting everybody's time to cater to people who refuse to learn. It should instead say "verification complete in n milliseconds" (or n microseconds if the milliseconds number looks too small). There could even be a "details" link with a log of all the verification steps.

That's not really what dark pattern means. They're about tricking people into doing something they otherwise wouldn't.

It's tricking people into waiting for nothing.

This is getting pedantic but: it's not tricking people into anything. People don't have a choice. In a real dark pattern, you're trying to convince users to do something -- here, the users were going to (get their numbers verified, do the web search, whatever) anyway, it's just the illusion of doing more work.

It's shitty but it's not evil.

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