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https://boun.cr/ has been active for years and I use it regularly on shady sites.

Do you have something similar for telephone numbers? (Often required to receive verification codes in text messages).

Search for "receive sms online"

Sorry for the "lmgtfy" type of answer, but I generally do that search then pick a site at random.

Whenever I try that, the number doesn't work. I either get an error message that the number isn't valid, or the text never arrives.

I think I tried with it with Twitter, Instagram and Google (when they asked me for a phone number and I didn't want to give my real one); this was about two years ago. Does anyone have better results?

When it comes to big providers like them you can assume that all numbers are either used by other people already or blocked.

If you just don't want to give out your number you could get a second one? Nowadays with eSim it should be easy to get a "pay as you go" number and only ever receive sms.

I eventually did get a second number and was still blocked by Instagram. Perhaps it was because of earlier attempts with temp phone numbers (I didn’t use VPN). But I don’t know for sure. I gave up after that.

For that, I would just recommend 5sim or smspva, personally used them, pretty solid.

As long as you expect to only use the number once then they should be fine.

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