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The only solution I can see is buying a burner phone to avoid these situations. Yesterday tried to set up a new to me used iPhone 7 for my son. It too forces a phone number from you. I had to link my phone number to his phone which I didn’t really want to do.

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Can you ever “burn” the number though? I’d be scared they will require you to receive a SMS token on it later, when they feel like it.

The problem with using a burner phone is that you could be assigned a phone number that has been blacklisted due to its abuse by a previous owner. Then Google terminates your account as soon as you use the banned number.

To be fair, this is a risk even with a "legitimate" number. How do you know whether the previous owner did anything nefarious with it before it was recycled and assigned to you?

Of course, the real solution is to remove the leverage Google has on you so that a ban is no longer a problem.

Can you recommend me any real working website where I could buy cheap one time virtual number that could be used to enable 2FA for my account?

And I hope they will never ever again ask me to confirm anything using that number.

Ah... I sense a very lucrative, low-ethics business model in providing "cheap one-time virtual [phone] numbers" to be used for security-sensitive purposes.

Unfortunately, others have already beat you to it.

For example, https://cheapglobalsms.com/

I went a slightly different route --- an old spare phone with Ultra Mobile PayGo prepaid SIM. For $3 per month you get 100 minutes of voice, 100 texts and 100 MB data per month.

The reason for this is that some security providers throw a little kink in the works by actually making a call to verify your number on sign-up.

I have used voip.ms for years. The basic plan costs approx 1 usd/m with no contracts, etc. and any messages received can be forwarded to and responded from email.

Nice try but this won't work with a lot of security providers.

Lookup APIs are available to identify line type and most will specifically reject voip numbers. The more obstinate providers I have encountered (some banks for example) will actually have a real human place a call to any number provided at sign up and reject it if they can't verbally talk to you.

It supports voice as well at this price - I use it with Linphone to receive and place calls plus I was also able to setup a forward rule where any calls to voip.ms numbers will be forwarded to my cellphone. Edit: you are right though that plenty of providers reject it as being a voip number.

> The only solution I can see is buying a burner phone to avoid these situation

Or, you know, stop fucking using google.

A "2FA Mule" is a special kind of burner phone that forwards the authentication to the endpoint of your choice - in my case, email:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29710908

How much do you pay monthly to keep the extra number? Is it worth that?

Depends on where you live. In my neck of the woods, burner phones are illegal. It's (nominally) impossible to get a phone number without getting ID verification. This applies to physical sims, but also to online services à la Twilio.

Providing ID verification to the carrier/government is one thing, providing it to Google is another. I'm personally much more comfortable with the government or carrier knowing my number than Google.

Sure, but that wasn't my point. My point was that it's very difficult to use a burner phone to bypass Google's data-guzzling.

Wait, you didn't want to add a phone number to a phone?

Twilio? Google voice?

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