I read every support ticket that comes in. A large share of them are not bugs — they are a mismatch between what somebody expected a virtual number to be and what it actually is. Writing the mismatches down is cheaper than answering them one at a time, so here they are, roughly in order of how often they arrive.
It cannot become your number
An activation number is lent to you for twenty minutes. A rental is assigned to you for the period you paid for. In both cases the number goes back to the pool afterwards and will be given to somebody else, often within the hour. There is no purchase, no porting and no permanent assignment. If a service texts that number next month, a stranger reads it.
This is the single biggest source of lost accounts: someone registers with an activation, keeps the account, and discovers six weeks later that the recovery number belongs to nobody they can reach. If the account matters, rent, and keep extending the rental.
It cannot send
Inbound only. There is no outbound SMS on any pool we sell, and we are not going to add it — outbound is where the abuse is, and an outbound-capable number is a spam engine with an invoice attached. If you need to send, you want a proper A2P provider with a registered sender, not us.
Banks, brokers and government services will usually refuse it
Regulated services check number ranges against carrier data and reject the ones that look like VoIP or shared inventory. Sometimes the rejection is honest and immediate. More often the signup appears to succeed, the code arrives, and the account is closed a week later during review. That second pattern is worse, because you have already put data into it.
We do not sell numbers as a way around identity verification, and we will not help with a ticket that is trying to. Use your own number.
It usually cannot take a voice call
Some services fall back to a phone call when the SMS does not arrive. Most of our inventory is SMS-only, and a call to it goes nowhere. A minority of pools support call-based OTP and those pairs are marked on the service page. If the marker is not there, assume the call will not work, because it will not.
It will not survive re-verification
Messaging apps in particular re-verify: a new device, a suspicious login, a routine sweep. That challenge goes to the number on file. With an activation, that number is long gone. Even with a rental, once the rental ends the challenge is unanswerable. Assume any account created this way is one re-verification away from being lost, and do not put anything in it you cannot afford to lose.
It is not anonymity
A rented number hides your personal number from one service. It does not hide you. We keep the records our jurisdiction requires us to keep, we respond to lawful requests, and the service you signed up to still has your IP, your device and your behaviour. Anyone selling virtual numbers as anonymity is selling something they cannot deliver.
No MMS, no RCS, no WhatsApp Business
We deliver SMS text. Picture messages are dropped upstream and we never see them. RCS never reaches the pool. WhatsApp Business verification runs a different check on the number's history and fails on shared inventory almost every time — the plain WhatsApp signup often works, the Business one generally does not, and buying activations until one sticks is an expensive way to be disappointed.
You cannot choose the number
You choose a country. You do not choose the prefix, the operator or the digits, and you cannot ask for the same number twice. If a specific range matters to you — some services accept mobile ranges only and reject a particular operator — the honest workaround is to buy one activation, look at what you got, and release it if the prefix is wrong. Each attempt costs cents and a failed attempt costs nothing.
A code can arrive and still be worthless
This is the limitation people find hardest to accept, because it looks like it worked. The SMS arrives, the code is valid, the account is created, and the service bans it four hours later because the number range was already flagged. Our success rate measures delivery, not outcome. We have no visibility into what happens inside the service afterwards, and no provider does, whatever their marketing says.
What to do instead
- Anything you intend to keep: rent, and extend before expiry.
- Anything regulated — banking, brokerage, government, insurance: use your own number.
- Bulk testing and one-shot signups: activations, in volume, and treat individual failures as free noise.
- Anything that needs a call: check the service page for the call marker first.
- Anything that needs to send: a different kind of provider entirely.
None of this is unique to us. It is what shared inbound inventory is. A provider who tells you otherwise is describing a product that does not exist.
Os artigos são publicados em inglês.