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> 2. use a DID from that service for your 2FA Except for the myriad companies who flatly refuse to permit their customers to use "VoIP" or "virtual" or anythin

> 2. use a DID from that service for your 2FA Except for the myriad companies who flatly refuse to permit their customers to use "VoIP" or "virtual" or anything-other-than-mobile numbers for SMS-based 2FA. My personal favorite is Zelle. I got a terms of service update a month or so ago, "you will no longer be permitted to use Google Voice other other VoIP or virtual numbers for Zelle and must provide a cell phone number to continue." Except that my cell phone service is provided by a company that buys blocks of data service and voice and SMS ride on that data, so the number "validates" as a VoIP number. I contacted my financial institution, "what do I do you have this number and it's worked great and it's the only number I have." Sorry, can't use Zelle any more.

drewg123 8y ago
Tell me about it. I use Google voice for everything and have for years. My bank won't do 2FA with anything but their own RSA dongle (no thanks) or a phone number, and won't accept the GV number. I don't want to give them the underlying phone number (t-mobile), since: (a) t-mobile is famous for being socially engineered to give out sims on other people's accounts. (b) I have no loyalty to this plan. I've had 5 or 6 underlying phone numbers since I started using grand central (now google voice) in the 2000s. I don't even know what my t-mobile number is (i have to look it up on my phone's settings).
- frosted-flakes 8y ago
  Isn't number porting a thing in the US? It should be quite easy to bring your number to a different carrier.
derefr 8y ago
Hack I used to get around that: at the time I was signing up for the VoIP provider, I had an existing cellphone number with a regular carrier. The VoIP provider let me transfer my cellphone number to them, just as if they were another cellular carrier. The number still shows up in directories as being owned by the original carrier (which I think is true in all cases where you transfer a number; the number is sort of "on loan" from the original carrier's assigned number space.) No 2FA (or KYC/AML) processes flatly reject my number, because it looks entirely legitimate to their heuristics. Still, sometimes the actual activation codes just mysteriously never arrive. Then I switch to using the actual DID associated with my (data-only) SIM, and the codes arrive instantly. I'm not sure whether this is their sending system being smarter about virtual numbers than their pre-check heuristics; or if it's just some weird gateway failure between my old and new carriers when (I presume) they try to forward the SMS from their SMSC to the VoIP carrier's SMSC.

drewg123 8y ago

Tell me about it. I use Google voice for everything and have for years. My bank won't do 2FA with anything but their own RSA dongle (no thanks) or a phone number, and won't accept the GV number. I don't want to give them the underlying phone number (t-mobile), since: (a) t-mobile is famous for being socially engineered to give out sims on other people's accounts. (b) I have no loyalty to this plan. I've had 5 or 6 underlying phone numbers since I started using grand central (now google voice) in the 2000s. I don't even know what my t-mobile number is (i have to look it up on my phone's settings).

frosted-flakes 8y ago
Isn't number porting a thing in the US? It should be quite easy to bring your number to a different carrier.

derefr 8y ago

Hack I used to get around that: at the time I was signing up for the VoIP provider, I had an existing cellphone number with a regular carrier. The VoIP provider let me transfer my cellphone number to them, just as if they were another cellular carrier. The number still shows up in directories as being owned by the original carrier (which I think is true in all cases where you transfer a number; the number is sort of "on loan" from the original carrier's assigned number space.) No 2FA (or KYC/AML) processes flatly reject my number, because it looks entirely legitimate to their heuristics. Still, sometimes the actual activation codes just mysteriously never arrive. Then I switch to using the actual DID associated with my (data-only) SIM, and the codes arrive instantly. I'm not sure whether this is their sending system being smarter about virtual numbers than their pre-check heuristics; or if it's just some weird gateway failure between my old and new carriers when (I presume) they try to forward the SMS from their SMSC to the VoIP carrier's SMSC.