Hi, there’s this situation i currently have with discord support, that they refuse to delete my phone number from my account. Basically every time i try to manually remove it, my account gets locked up until i add another phone number in order to continue accessing the service, “for security reasons” with no option for email verification (of course).

I contacted the support team asking for clarifications and if they could remove the phone number and, in short, they said that they couldn’t do that since my account was flagged somehow, and that they won’t remove the phone verification…

(their email)

Now, what are your opinions about this? Should i use a free voip number site in order to replace my real phone number with the fake one? My concern is that i don’t know who could own that number so i don’t know if it’s safe to trust it, and i’m not willing to spend any money for this

  • neutron
    3·
    1 year ago

    Best bet is to purchase a prepaid sim card and activate it with an old spare mobile phone (if you have one, that is). This is how you get a “physical” number that’s authentic enough for sms verification. This is assuming you live in a place where prepaid sims are sold freely and can be activated without hassles.

    There are websites and applications offering “burner numbers” for situations like this or people living in places that place restrictions in new sim cards. Most of them tend to get their numbers from voip providers sold cheaply. They can work most of the time, but picky organizations like Google and Discord can and will probably detect voip numbers when it’s the case.

    My personal experience is that Google doesn’t like it and refuse those ones, asking for an actual “physical” phone number. Discord, on the other hand, did accept voip numbers when I tried (around 2 years ago).

    • Onihikage@beehaw.orgEnglish
      4·
      1 year ago

      To add on to this, after you verify your account with a prepaid sim number, you can port that number to a free VoIP service so it becomes useless for tracking you IRL but you can still use it to reset your password if needed. It’s not like they keep checking after it’s already verified.