4 ms·

Mobile phone number verification, ie. prove that you're a human in countryX by entering your mobile phone nr. in the US and we send you an SMS code or something

Mobile phone number verification, ie. prove that you're a human in countryX by entering your mobile phone nr. in the US and we send you an SMS code or something. Google does (did?) that if I remember correctly.

njl 16y ago
I built this using twilio yesterday. It took maybe an hour, from research to code to commit.
- ktsmith 16y ago
  I've rolled this out recently as well, we give the user the option of a voice call or SMS. We did this knowing that about 50% of our users sign up by giving us a land line and may not have a cell phone. Twilio provides a code example right on the site for voice based verification where their system will call you and ask you to enter a number you have been presented with on the site. We do the inverse where you get a call/sms with a verification code and then have to enter it on the site. I would make a couple of points though, we've run into several sites that don't provide a mechanism to have the call retried (answering machine, undelivered cell call, etc) or to go back and enter a verification code if it was captured by voice mail etc. Google lets you enter the code whenever you get it, Twilio lets you initiate a new call with a new number, but many ignore this problem.
johns 16y ago
I work at Twilio and this is an extremely common use case for our service. We have two recent blog posts that show how to do both SMS and phone-based verification: http://blog.twilio.com/2010/05/sms-phone-verification-with-twilio-and-php.html http://blog.twilio.com/2010/05/sms-phone-verification-with-t... http://blog.twilio.com/2010/05/simple-phone-verification-with-twilio-php-mysql-and-jquery.html http://blog.twilio.com/2010/05/simple-phone-verification-wit...
- TeHCrAzY 16y ago
  Unfortunate that the service requires a US based billing address, is there any way to work around that?
  - johns 16y ago
    Unfortunately, not at this time.
  - akalsey 16y ago
    You could use a service that works internationally like http://tropo.com/ http://tropo.com/, http://cloudvox.com http://cloudvox.com, or any voicexml hosting company.
buro9 16y ago
Given that I've 'verified' a US address based on a Skype number in Chicago I have whilst I am based in London, UK. Well... I wouldn't say that a phone number verifies anything more than something can respond to the endpoint. If you need real verification of a human and their identity, don't use phones for it. Especially not an automated phone system.
- johns 16y ago
  There's a few reasons to do it: 1) Provide an additional time-consuming, potentially slightly costly and hard-to-automate barrier to negate spammers (like Gmail does during signup). 2) Verify that someone controls a number before using it as an interface to your app either through notifications or control (adding appointments or tasks, etc). Like you mention there's no way to use this method to verify someone is who they claim to be. But there aren't really any methods for this type of thing that can't be spoofed.

njl 16y ago

I built this using twilio yesterday. It took maybe an hour, from research to code to commit.

ktsmith 16y ago
I've rolled this out recently as well, we give the user the option of a voice call or SMS. We did this knowing that about 50% of our users sign up by giving us a land line and may not have a cell phone. Twilio provides a code example right on the site for voice based verification where their system will call you and ask you to enter a number you have been presented with on the site. We do the inverse where you get a call/sms with a verification code and then have to enter it on the site. I would make a couple of points though, we've run into several sites that don't provide a mechanism to have the call retried (answering machine, undelivered cell call, etc) or to go back and enter a verification code if it was captured by voice mail etc. Google lets you enter the code whenever you get it, Twilio lets you initiate a new call with a new number, but many ignore this problem.

johns 16y ago

I work at Twilio and this is an extremely common use case for our service. We have two recent blog posts that show how to do both SMS and phone-based verification: http://blog.twilio.com/2010/05/sms-phone-verification-with-twilio-and-php.html http://blog.twilio.com/2010/05/sms-phone-verification-with-t... http://blog.twilio.com/2010/05/simple-phone-verification-with-twilio-php-mysql-and-jquery.html http://blog.twilio.com/2010/05/simple-phone-verification-wit...

TeHCrAzY 16y ago
Unfortunate that the service requires a US based billing address, is there any way to work around that?
- johns 16y ago
  Unfortunately, not at this time.
- akalsey 16y ago
  You could use a service that works internationally like http://tropo.com/ http://tropo.com/, http://cloudvox.com http://cloudvox.com, or any voicexml hosting company.

buro9 16y ago

Given that I've 'verified' a US address based on a Skype number in Chicago I have whilst I am based in London, UK. Well... I wouldn't say that a phone number verifies anything more than something can respond to the endpoint. If you need real verification of a human and their identity, don't use phones for it. Especially not an automated phone system.

johns 16y ago
There's a few reasons to do it: 1) Provide an additional time-consuming, potentially slightly costly and hard-to-automate barrier to negate spammers (like Gmail does during signup). 2) Verify that someone controls a number before using it as an interface to your app either through notifications or control (adding appointments or tasks, etc). Like you mention there's no way to use this method to verify someone is who they claim to be. But there aren't really any methods for this type of thing that can't be spoofed.