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Comment by Joe8Bit | Hacker News Reader

I had a UK mobile number that had seven consecutive digits (e.g. 079* 444 4444). I got it through a friend who worked in provisioning at a new mobile operator that had just been assigned its new number blocks.

The problem was people would constantly try to "steal" the number. Four or five times a year my phone would just stop working because someone had "persuaded" a call-centre worker at my provider to assign the number to a new SIM they could sell on eBay. Apparently people pay a LOT of money for vanity numbers.

No matter what additional "security locks" they put on my account it kept getting hijacked, so eventually I just got a new (much less interesting) number.

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At work the telecom guy was proud of the telephone number he gave me ("very easy to remember!" he said). Well, it turns out it was one digit off of the local Alcoholics Anonymous help line. I had digit "1" and AA had "7". I got a lot of drunken phone calls and voice messages. All depressing since they were asking for help. Figured it out after a few calls, but from now on I'll take the ugly telephone numbers.

Had the same case when local (although quite large) bus terminal helpline had similar number.

Calls like "where the heck is my bus?" or "how can get to xxx" at 2am weren't so rare until I changed the number

Many years ago I worked at a pizza place. The town I was in had numbers in two different exchanges (the three digits between the area code and the final four digits in US numbers). Pretend the pizza place had the number 123-4567. The other exchange in that town was 321.

Naturally, the number 321-4567 just got some person's house. That person set up their answering machine message to say that "Due to a rash of prank calls, we are no longer accepting phone orders" without actually specifying who isn't accepting phone orders. Naturally people would show up in person highly confused about this.

In China, that would be the unluckiest phone number ever. My 30 story Beijing apartment building lacked floors 4, 14, and 24 due to superstition about 4 meaning death.

That sounds absurd. I can't believe a civilized society would exclude so many floors! In the US where we are completely reasonable and rational we only exclude the 13th floor. I used to work on the "14th floor" (actually floor 13) and I thought this was hilarious.

In China what happens on the 4th floor stays on the 4th floor.

In Thailand every 13th floor is named 12A. They’re not fooling anyone.

It might also be a trick on the building owner to make their building look taller. They also exclude the 13th, so that’s a total of 4 floors excluded, but it is only 30 stories, so they get to exclude 34 as well so the top floor is 35.

Awesome. Imagine telling folks that calls to you had better be important enough to warrant risking death!

Apparently it's pretty common for tall buildings in NYC to skip a few floors so that the top floors have higher numbers. I was grateful for this when my friend's building's power was out and I had to take the stairs to the 42nd floor.

A Harvest Moon game on the GBA would softlock if you interacted with the clock or something at 4:44.

I feel like if I was superstitious about floor numbers I'd still not want to live on the 4th/14th/24th floor regardless of what they called it. It's still the 4th/14th/24th floor.

Is the first floor the floor at ground level or the one above that?

I appreciate your contrition of contention.

That's not that bad. There is a building in HK with no floors at all with 4 in them. So it is missing 4, 14, 24, 34, 40-49, 54, ...

And its not that four meaning death. In Cantonese, the word for "four" sounds very close to the word for "death"

I had the same problem. Same type of 07 number as you - all consecutive. It was too much hassle. Also, with that number and my 07969696969 number that I thought was hilarious, I just had infinity prank calls all day, and worst of all, all night...

This is why the idea of 2FA using a mobile number is so absurd.

It still requires more effort to move a phone number to a new SIM than to convince an airline to reset your password.

I hate that SMS is so much relied on (in particular as it fails so bad in travel settings), but I think we're stuck with it for a long time before we get alternative that work at least half as much for standard people that don't buy into ecosystems.

it still prevents drive by attacks. without 2fa, having accounts is basically free (take a list of leaked passwords, and try them on 20 sites). with 2fa, it will probably take 15-30 minutes per account of relatively adept social engineering. it won't stop a targeted attack, but it will prevent 95%

The GP is talking about SMS for 2fa. Much better to use an app like Google Authenticator or a secure token which doesn't rely on 3rd parties (mobile phone companies) being secure.

We all agree that 2fa is good, that is a moot point.

oh yeah, authenticator apps and hardware keys are way better than sms, but I worry a little about demonizing sms 2fa too much since plenty of (especially older) people don't have smart phones, and are never going to use a hardware key. since any 2fa is a huge step up, I think sms based 2fa is likely good to promote in tandem with the better methods. (that said, it drives me insane that most banks only offer sms based 2fa. that should be illegal)

Do NOT use Google Authenticator unless every account you use it for has an alternate MFA option (backup codes, etc) that you've confirmed work. It does not sync to your Google account and there is no way to back it up (even manually). The moment your phone gets stolen, breaks or dropped in a river, you will learn a very quick lesson about MFA backups/alternates.

> Four or five times a year my phone would just stop working because someone had "persuaded" a call-centre worker at my provider to assign the number to a new SIM they could sell on eBay

And they were unable to add a note to that account to the effect of "don't do X under any circumstances"?

They put all kinds of locks on the account but they never worked, my assumption was that people who worked at the provider (who could unlock anything) were the ones stealing it!

And there was no audit trail for their actions? Wow.

Now you know why SMS 2fa isn't secure :)

Assuming that its similar to att, there is an audit trail, but noone will care to look at it for you. They will give your number back and consider it solved.

Could have tried transferring the number to another operator if that's an option.

When i worked at att all of those things were just notes on the bottom of the account. You had to specifically scroll down and try to read it.

Besides that a caller might press one too many or less amount of times the same number. It is all about muscle memory, and between address books and clipboards you might only have to enter it once (or not even that!).

That being said I still remember my old phone number I had as kid but I cannot figure out to remember my wife's (acquired number in 2015 aka the age of smartphone was into effect).

Distressing! I have a terrible memory so I fantasize about having a phone number like that. Please tell me you at least made some money off of it.

This isn’t “stealing”, it’s just that, stealing. There should be legal consequences for providers that let this happen.

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