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Comment by fooqux | Hacker News Reader

It's also not a long-term solution. At some point, your ported number will be updated and flagged as a "voip number" since it's now associated to Google Voice. At that point, you'll start having issues as many services don't like it when people use a number they can acquire for free in a couple minutes as the UID.

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Doesn’t work that way for Canadian numbers. Only original issuer is public info. Porting info is on a need-to-know basis (ie: telecoms need to terminate calls; but that’s it).

This can work against you of course, so a good strategy is to get a burner phone and port that number to your VoIP provider.

Shouldn't it be the same for the US and Canada? Both are administered by NANPA. Last time I looked into this (early 2020), you generally couldn't get porting info for US numbers, though original issuer was public and easily accessible.

Since US and Can have number portability, it’s managed by a Number Portability Administrator. That’s Neustar in Canada:

https://www.npac.com/canadian-number-portability/the-npac-ne...

Great to know, so far I’ve been able to still receive SMS 2FA messages but it’s only been a couple of days since porting.

I've used a google voice number as my primary number for quite a while, and it's actually pretty rare to have issues with it. I'd say that much less than 1/10 of services require me to use my cell's actual number.

Google Voice needs to be linked to a valid +1 land or mobile number to function long term. My google voice number lasted for almost exactly 6 months after the us cell number it was linked to was disconnected (moved overseas for a while). It’s classification as a valid mobile lasted a bit less long and now I can not use it to send/receive SMS at all (voice mail works but it will not ring through and I can no longer use it to call. Before that many banks etc stopped Sending SMS 2fa messages through (as the are supposed according to latest NIST guidelines). Thankfully (?) the same banks seem ok to do voice 2fa to my overseas number. Sadly the still do not support better mfa Authenticators.

Would love to know how to maintain a US SMS presence without sketchy obviously for spammers products.

I've been using jmp.chat and have been pretty happy with them. But I haven't tried using them as 2fa provider, they may be blocked by places that block common voip providers.

discord is a big offender

SMS gateways know the destination provider too, and I believe this is how blocking VoIP numbers is implemented in practice.

Before I retired (2019), I was getting emails from our telecom providers that Canadian regulators were mandating that they not share porting information with customers (us), although it was generally available before, and was still available in other countries of interest (mostly US), for a fee.

Burner phone numbers in the US seem to be of a particular range of numbers and can also be flagged. I used to use pay as you go burners for random tasks in the past and noticed they gave me trouble when trying to use them to get verification codes sometimes.

I'm not sure what you mean when you say "burner phone". I know for a fact that you can get a regular prepaid plan from T-Mobile and pay for it cash, no IDs; that fits the "burner phone" requirements for me. Do you mean that every prepaid plan uses that range of numbers?

Prepaid plan vs post-paid, probably not, but some discount prepaid providers are probably considered “less trust-worthy”, or less profitable when evaluating VoIP numbers.

I went abroad from Canada for two years, tried to park two numbers to Virgin on cheap prepaid (still paying 5-10$ just to hold a number). Well they fucked up credit card payments on both accounts, closed them after a couple of months and stole our numbers. So aggravating to go through the trouble of parking the numbers, paying perhaps 300$ and then the aggravation of trying unsuccessfully to get those numbers back, and the aggravation of trying to figure out which services use those numbers for 2FA.

Canadian telcos are basically a scam (and Virgin is now my top hated one, assholes).

2FA using phone numbers is idiotic.

Should have portes to VoIP.ms or similar.

For sure, the second factor is supposed to be "something you own" and phone numbers are not that.

That's interesting, although my ISP seemed to know I was calling from a VoIP number (my "land line", as it were). She even knew my secondary number was a VoIP number.

I think in the end she put one of the numbers down in the application after a little pursuasion.

For whatever it's worth, that's not permanent. My current number was originally a GV number and used to get flagged as a voip number. But I ported it out to a mobile carrier a year ago (which Google makes you pay for) and haven't had an issue since.

What I’ve seen is services will verify the number at sign up then never again.

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