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Ask HN: Where do virtual phone number services get the numbers from?
There are hundreds of free and paid services or just plain websites which have virtual phone numbers available for receiving SMS messages.
For example:
https://online-sms.org
https://quackr.io/temporary-numbers
(there are hundreds of those and they work, I've just tested it)
Then there are professional services such as Twilio.
Due to the abundance of those websites I assume it must be fairly straightforward to get such a virtual number yourself, but my best Google Fu didn't yield any good results.
Does anyone know how this works and would be able to shed some light on it?
- eva_cananim 3y agoIf you want one number there is the option of getting a SIM card and putting it in a cellular modem. You can get an old Wavecom cellular modem for few dollars on ebay, from a software point of view you open the serial port and send text AT commands to say "list messages" "send me message 1" "delete message 1" In some countries you would need to consider the 2G switch off, a 4G modem is going to be a bit more expensive
- dustedcodes 3y agoIs this what these services do? They somewhere have a room of devices with actual SIM cards in them and then having all the SMS comms synced back into the cloud service? I thought there was an easier way given the sheer amount of websites which offer completely free of charge SMS retrieval services.