Greg from Twilio here.
Agreed on the challenge of working with a fixed number of phone numbers (and I say this as someone who recently moved to NYC and would love to own a 212 number).
In the industry, phone numbers that have a high-volume of unwanted traffic are called "dirty numbers." Think of a number used by someone who signed up for every sweepstakes they came across for 40 years, or maybe a number that's particularly cute (you probably don't want to have a cellphone tied to XXX-867-5309).
If we sold them, dirty numbers would be worse-than-useless for (almost all) of our customers. So, whenever a phone number is released by a Twilio customer, we reserve it for a minimum of two months before it can be purchased by another account. We also monitor each reserved number until it reaches an acceptably low number of phone calls.
If you do find yourself getting unwanted calls, you can use the <Reject>TwiML verb[^1] to create a blacklist - your account won’t receive or be charged for those calls.
[1]: https://www.twilio.com/docs/api/twiml/reject