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What gets me are all of the places (like Venmo, et al) who pitch a fit if a user dares give them a not-a-real-mobile-number. Even if the number is SMS-capable, they complain.

I wonder if the fact that services like this won't work on VoIP numbers is a reason why. Regardless of the motivation, it's annoying because I don't give out my real mobile number to hardly anyone for this--and spam call/text avoidance--reason.

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Not-a-real-phone-number accounts have a much higher than average probability of being a bot or a scammer. (That's because scammers can automate signing up for voip numbers; getting a thousand real Verizon numbers is much harder.) And Venmo had a strong financial incentive to ban signups that look like bots and scammers.

If Venmo were a brick and mortar business, they could just ask you to come by a local office so they can verify your ID in person. But they don't have a local office; so the reasonable and profitable solution is to preemptively ban you.

I fear the reason is that the pools of VoIP numbers have already been exhausted as a resource for setting up’accounts.

Ie: some firm is renting VoIP numbers for a month for $1, creating accounts on 100 services and then moving to the next VoIP number.

Perhaps the VoIP firms support this whenever they get a block of « virgin » numbers before putting them in their regular pool of numbers for rent.

This just means that phone numbers make for terrible identifiers because there's a fixed number of them and they're transient.

The transience bit is going to become a huge problem over the next decade. I've personally had 3 phone numbers since college (an out-of-state # doesn't mesh well with my career and I've moved several times) and at least one of the individuals who picked up one of my old numbers is the kind of person who has potential for serious run-ins with the law. My mother called my old # once and I guess it was auctioned to company that has a big market in prepaid "burner" phones. In the era of "Big Data" I can't even begin to imagine the sort of hilarious comedy (sarcasm) that can result from the two of us being linked together by what has become a primary source of personal identification.

I use my Russian cell phone number when the Google Voice burner won’t work.

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