Ask HN: Can you make virtual phone numbers at scale? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Can you make virtual phone numbers at scale?

2 pointsblakeburch8 comments

I'm looking for something like Privacy.com or Ramp but for phone numbers.

I'm tired of getting spam calls and texts. I want the ability to give each business or individual a unique number with unique rules for when and how that number can be contacted. If I never want to be contacted again, I just remove the virtual number.

I'm aware of services like Twilio or Google Voice that allow me to do number forwarding... but it's pretty cumbersome to set up at scale (and I believe Google Voice is limited to 1 number).

Beyond the general privacy focus and reducing spam, it seems like this could have good use cases for public figures, people with stalkers, dealing with your ex, etc.

Does a service like this exist? If not, what are the technological complications preventing this from existing?

View on HN

At this point, my number gets enough spammy calls that I've effectively given up on considering it any sort of "secret", tbh.

I still create one-off emails, but given the comparable amount of spam I get - 99% of it to a typo'ed email address from a decade ago - even that hardly seems worth it.

Also, if these numbers randomly rotate, I'd wager you'd still get spam calls, no? As one number gets "burned" (as much as a trivially-wardialable 10-digit number can be considered to be a secret), it'll be placed back into the pool, and you'll just get spam aimed at someone else.

The thought process I had is that the numbers could have logic rules to rereoute to the right individual based on the number calling.

For example, let's say the centralized service has a virtual number of 123-456-7890. If someone with the number 444-444-4444 calls it, it routes to my actual number. If someone with the number 555-555-5555 calls it, it routes to someone else's number. If anyone else calls it, it just doesn't work. If I remove the number from my account, when 444-444-4444 calls it, it not longer works.

In my mind, this is similar to having a virtual card that rejects the transaction if it doesn't match a specific merchant/category. Since phone numbers are more limited, you'd have to have shared virtual numbers, whereas virtual cards are 100% unique.

But under this scheme, you'd have to know the originating number of the company you're handing it out to, right? I certainly don't know my dentist's outgoing number - I might know their incoming number, but I don't know about outgoing. Same for anyone else I might give my number to.

And what happens if two people with the same "burner" number give it to the same business?

Fair points on potentially not knowing the outgoing number. I'll have to chew on that problem for a bit. Difficult, but I don't think unsolvable.

Either way, the solution I proposed is a non-ideal workaround to a better system of truly unique virtual numbers. But as you mentioned, spammers are still gonna spam numbers, whether they're virtual or not.

I think in the grand scheme, I'm ok with the potential of spam as long as no single person (besides the Telecom provider) ever has record of my actual number. If the real number leaks, it would make it easier to transfer the real number, since every existing number you've given out simply redirects to the new number.

I genuinely don't think this is one of those problems that you can solve with technology. As long as America, and the world, uses a fairly short number for telephone calls - which it must - people will be able to either dial whole exchanges for effectively nickels, or they'll be able to buy or steal (or both) this information.

This feels like a problem that can only be solved with regulation, the kind with some muscle behind it. The kind that becomes an existential threat to the sort of company that allows someone to call me five times a day to sell me a home security system with a robot lady, who then redirects me to a human in a boiler room in Tashkent/Dhaka/Indianapolis/Sevastopol/Mumbai.

There's only a fixed amount of phone numbers, but you can gate the person behind a single number by an extension, just like businesses do.

Give out your regular number, and generate a unique extension for each business or individual.

Have an IVR, bot, or service answer the number. "Hi, you've reached blakeburch, if you have an extension number, please dial it now." Valid extensions get routed to you, invalid or expired ones go to voicemail.

Having my own extension system is interesting... I'll explore that avenue.

Minimal research says that even with restrictions on certain number combinations and area codes, there should be ~5 billion possible numbers, enough to make a virtual number system possible.

I don’t think so. SaaS is probably off the table on cost. You could maybe do it in hardware with a bunch of old school office voip systems routing to modems or something? But that only scales to a point.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com