Hacker News Reader

Comment by wslh | Hacker News Reader

The problem is phone number reuse, if you try to open an anonymous Google, Twitter, etc account they immediately realize that phone number was already used.

View on HN

A lot of services that use SMS for new account verification also block numbers from non-mobile providers, even ones that haven't been used before. I tried using a Twilio number as a Google-Voice-like service where it would forward texts to my actual number, but many services refused to accept the Twilio number.

Yep. We’re able to figure out VoIP numbers pretty easily thanks to services like Twilio Lookup. Helped out anti fraud out so much.

But blocked legit users who ported their real phone numbers to VoIP, like I did. Google won't verify an account against my home phone line anymore.

How can we continue to reduce fraud while still serving folks who are using the system legitimately?

We offer users an easy way to contact us to request manual whitelisting. It's painless, fast, and we find that not much abuse gets through when they have to write in messages to get in.

Who are "we"?

You have commented twice saying "We." And it is not clear who the "we" is. Do you work for mailinator, Twilio, Google?

Sorry, I was commenting from the perspective of a company that uses phone verification for account signups to help with fraud. I am not affiliated with any of the listed company.

>But blocked legit users who ported their real phone numbers to VoIP, like I did. Google won't verify an account against my home phone line anymore.

weird. i use a voip phone service, but twilio identifies it as a landline. maybe you're not using a fixed location voip service?

I use Google Fi as my mobile carrier. It is blocked from virtually everything even though it is a legitimate Sprint+T-Mobile sim.

Really? It should identify as a T-Mobile number. Have you tried contacting Fi support?

Yeah. I was one of the earlier users, the number identifies as GV-Grandcentral, formerly Bandwidth

It's basically rejected from every messenger, I can't use it with paypal or banking, etc.

Same problem but with normal google voice numbers. Really frustrating.

The google fi number isn’t your T-Mobile phone number. There is actually a way to find the actual t-mobile phone number that Fi forwards to, perhaps you can get that and use it instead.

Google Fi is Google Voice routed through T-mobiles network

I want to use virtual numbers to avoid the spammers. There have been plenty of companies that had pseudo dodgy signup (win a chance for a dream trip to somewhere) where you had to give up your phone number (supposedly so they could call you). Lots of time I get spam calls that claim I gave permission for them to call me. So a temporary forwarding number hides me. I use my google voice number for this and it does a good job of noticing lots of spammers (but not all).

I'm using voip.ms with an E911 registered location. We've used the number for years with traditional carriers. The service has been great for a good price otherwise.

Is there any non-VoIP telephony left?

"VoIP" is a generic term in this case as they mean numbers that can be rented online by a customer directly, with little to no identity checks - sadly those are often used for fraud, though outright denying service on this basis alone is a dick move IMO.

Pretty much all telephony is VoIP for at least parts of the call chain, though there are still even analog circuits in place; here are some numbers that lead to analog switching gear: http://www.binrev.com/forums/index.php?/topic/48166-ukrainia...

Only from those providers that explicitly disclose this fact; I provide API-driven phone numbers (from a carrier partner) and those show up as the carrier's numbers on every lookup tool, with no way to distinguish them from numbers allocated to SIMs directly. I actually really like this fact and will make sure it stays that way.

What's your service called?

Nextgrid, though at the moment it's still a work in progress (building an entire telco core network from scratch by yourself takes a looooong time), but in the meantime you can get the numbers from my carrier partner directly: https://aa.net.uk/telecoms.html

Those are UK mobile numbers, with SIP for voice and webhooks for texts, and all lookup tools I've found recognise their numbers as "Three" (a mobile carrier in the UK) mobile numbers.

I am not actually sure how those guys interconnect to Three, it could even be literally a bunch of GSM modems with real SIMs in it. My long-term plan is to get rid of the middleman and become a carrier myself (get a number range allocated by OFCOM, UK's telco regulator) and offer both SIMs and API-driven numbers (with no way of distinguishing which is which from the outside).

Definitely cool service - do these numbers support MMS?

Not at the moment no. I might look into it before launch but to be honest nowadays there is very little business case for MMS so I’m not sure it’s worth the investment.

Just out of curiosity, what do you use MMS for?

I can't find your website through Google. Do you mind linking it?

Do you have any partners in the US?

Which brings the question, when will 'ipv6' for phone numbers come out?

Why would it need to...? We aren’t running out of phone numbers.

We will, if this trend continues...

Phone numbers are regularly cycled. The nice thing about something like ipv6 is that you could build a system where reuse isn't any more convenient.

And with your own personal block of /64, you could give out unique numbers to anyone you want ^_^

We need to think about it before running out of phone numbers.

just like we did for ipv6. think about it for years, people argue and we kind of solve all problems but too late.

I keep getting calls for the previous owner. I would love if i could get something unique.

There's a proposal for 12-digit phone numbers in the NANP (US and Canada), but the current 10-digit numbering plan isn't expected to run out of numbers until 2044.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Numbering_Plan_...

I don't think we need a system of phone numbers at all - IPv6 by itself can already do that.

The biggest roadblock there is that the scammy telco industry's entire business model is based on charging through the ass for what is essentially a 8kbps voice channel. Doing calls via IP would cut that revenue stream and would put a lot of irrelevant people out of a job so it'll be very hard to succeed, though I fully support the idea - it's complete heresy that I can download a 1GB file across the Atlantic for pretty much free but a 12 hour call that would total maybe 40MB would cost a ton.

I get your point but the phone companies wouldn't be able to survive, and when I talk to people on wifi it's never as good as a phone call. They must be using dedicated routing or something, even though I think we are past the world of direct circuits.

> I get your point but the phone companies wouldn't be able to survive

Do we need them to survive? They can and should go the way of the dodo and leave place for ISPs instead.

> and when I talk to people on wifi it's never as good as a phone call

That's a side-effect of crap Wi-Fi gear, but can be resolved by placing the call over LTE and using stuff like MPTCP to combine both the Wi-Fi and LTE connection. In fact, VoLTE is essentially SIP (which is IP-based) over LTE, so there's a good chance you're already using an IP system and not realising it, which I guess proves the point that it's good enough if not better than legacy circuit-switched calls.

It's not on the level of never having to reuse a number, but arguably we've already seen something similar to IPv4->IPv6 (restructuring/numbering to add capacity) in the UK through PhONEday/Big Number Change. Expanding that out to never having to reuse a number, especially now that most people don't have to remember phone numbers (or at least far fewer), doesn't seem that difficult (at least on the numbering end; I don't know about the engineering side of that).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhONEday / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Number_Change

Phone numbers do get recycled in a lot of countries though.

Are there countries where it's not necessary to recycle them?

Which is really annoying. Still getting calls, two+ years in, for the previous owner of my number. Including from medical providers.

A CVS half a continent away from has been calling me thinking that I am the previous owner of this phone number for the last six months or so. First they were leaving voicemails that I need to pick up a prescription and that they will return it in a day and stop calling me. But they have been calling every few days or so ever since.

I had this phone number for over 4 years.

That's always been the case. The problem is that, especially over the last couple of decades, people have built lots of systems with a central assumption being that phone numbers are uniquely tied to individuals.

So, instead of fixing those systems, I guess the idea is to adapt phone numbers to the faulty assumptions made about them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com