As the tittle sais, i was trying to create an instagram account and it is not possible without a phone number. Same with discord. Obviously i dont want to provide mine. Any working solutions to bypass this? not looking for alternative private service, i already use them.
Have you tried Firefox Relay? They have a paid tier that gives you a phone number and unlimited email masks. Yes, you have to provide a number, and yes you have to pay, but you wouldn’t be giving Meta or Discord your contact info.
I’m not OP but thanks for the recommendation. I’ll be looking into this
There are several masking services available, at different price ranges and with different feature sets. Relay is a good one, there’s also MySudo (I remember it being advertised for a while back when it was iOS only), Ironvest etc.
If you’re looking at services that only give you one temporary phone number, you might want to consider a budget phone provider too. FreedomPop is “free” if you buy their SIM card, ignore their upgrade offers, and adhere to their rules.
Is it out for everyone? Last time I checked it said coming soon and I ended up getting anonaddy instead.
Yes, it is.
Edit: downvoted because I was able to sign up for a service recently?
Not here it seems. Still shows join waiting list.
A UK VPN gives me a wait list, but switching to US gives me a signup.
Probably down voted for saying its available for everyone when it is currently regional.
I tried making an IG account a couple years ago, and they wanted me to send them a selfie with me holding up my ID. FOH with that shit lol.
Had the same thing, really crazy
Lmao for ig wow
My advice would be: don’t. Either get a second SIM you use for account registration, or seek alternative services.
People found ways to bypass these requirements for Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and a bunch of other services. Eventually the services assume everyone has a phone number attached (because the bypasses should’ve been impossible in the first place) and people got locked out of accounts. If you use a service to forward text messages just for registration and nothing else, that number will soon be reassigned to someone else; that other person can either “recover” your account or you can get hit with a mass ban when eventually the 100th person to use that phone number registers a bunch of spam bots.
If you trust your friends, you could set up a shared phone number your friends/family gets to use. For small amount of accounts, this should help your privacy without risking mass bans. This can be done through VoIP providers, or probably through some dedicated services.
A second sim is the only options for some. Either ChatGPT or one of those requires a real-world mobile number. Anything on a VoIP is blacklisted. I literally can’t sign up for it or a couple other oddball services (like the Dunkin’ app*) because I refuse to divulge my carrier number to anyone but my family and 2-3 close friends. I have a (former) mobile number and two former landline numbers on VoIP that are my real, active numbers but some services simply refuse to use them.
* I’d use my freebie backup sim for registration, but many use that # as their required+sole 2FA “security“ so signing up with it is useless as I’d have to use that phone every time I interacted. Maybe it’s time to look into eSIMs.
Cheap VoIP definitely won’t work, but there are business VoIP providers that don’t get abused by spam bots because of the price. They’ll work. Google Fi and other such combined real numbers should also work.
If getting the second number is easy or affordable, it’s probably been blacklisted, because scammers will abuse those services. That’s the whole reason you need to provide a phone number in the first place, companies want proof that you have something that’s difficult to get a whole bunch of to prevent spam accounts.
All my main numbers VoIP are Google. I’ve got two others at a large (Canadian, iirc) provider.
Where I’m from you can buy a prepaid SIM card at a gas station which works just fine
You just need a number that doesn’t show up as VoIP, it doesn’t actually need to be a SIM card. So if you have a Google fi number, you can use Google messages to access it over the web, even when the phone is off. Because when Carriers look the number up it doesn’t come over as VoIP it shows up as an actual mobile number.
You can get numbers from twilio in countries that don’t report voip status. That also works.
If you need a number in a country that does report VoIP status, you can use the phone number providers I posted in a different comment in this thread, to get a temporary number that is not VoIP, and receive your SMS verification
https://kycnot.me/search?q=sms&type=
Here is a list of services that accept crypto payments to give you sms receive access to a phone number. This way you can sms verify your account, with a throw away number.
Once you create the account setup passkeys or use a fido2 key as your two factor verification. That way you can validate access’s to the account in the future without sms.
Been using jmp.chat. I didn’t have to give any personal info. It uses XMMP/Jabber to handle text/calls instead of wrapping your existing number. Their in-house client is pretty nice as it integrates with the dialer.
They straight up tell you its not private. That’s not what I use it for. I use it to make my online activity less linkable when companies try to KYC me by requiring a TN.
The phone network itself does not encrypt metadata or content. Therefore, if your concern is a state-level actor, exploit of a service provider, or rogue employee, you should consider all the metadata and content of your phone calls and text and picture messages to be not private.
Give your phone number to these shady crypto bros instead! 🙃
The whole point is you’re not giving your information to anybody. You don’t give any information to the temporary number people.
Pay cash at walmart for a burner phone.
As I understand you receive the message on a website this way
Yeh I was being facetious. They are transparent about which service requires what, and what they are capable of (not all accept codes). And you pay in crypto (they only support established ones), which is by definition anonymous.
Damn, is it really like that now? I created my accounts for IG, Google, Discord, years ago and without a number. I refuse to provide it when they ask now and never had an issue.
Lately IG won’t even let me log in wihout confirming my phone number so I’ve just stopped using it.
Same here, even worst if they detect you are using a VPN, they tag the account directly. This is the main issue in all services nowadays
Discord can outright block you from using it if it decides to ask to connect a phone number post-registration.
No they don’t. Lol. I’ve been using my discord for years without a number.
I didn’t say they always do it. I said they can, and they do sometimes. Happened to a close friend of mine after she logged in via Ripcord, though it may be unrelated.
Has more to do with using a third-party client then, which they don’t like
We can only speculate. Many have used those without issues for years.
And many didn’t, including myself. Never did anything that violates their terms before, but one day after I started trying out alternative clients, access to my account got terminated.
That was two years ago though, I’ve heard they’re a bit less strict now.
Third party client. That’s why. It’s to combat spam and bots.
Yep it is very aggressive nowadays, simple services asking for sensitive information.
If in the US, Prepaid sim with fake info. Mint’s trial sim gives you 7 days iirc for 2$ Edit: thought it was obvious but just to be clear, setup another form of 2fa after, like totp
My experience with the app Burner was pretty good because the app can accept texts from new numbers, unlike a lot of free online phone apps. It’s not free, however.
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Some services recognize VOIP numbers and intentionally reject them because they see mobile numbers as a more limited resource for abuse prevention purposes, or more valuable personal data for tying to an identity and selling what they know about you to advertisers.
You can create an instagram account with Tor for example, but it’s extremely difficult. First try creating and Facebook account with their onion address. If not possible, try with the clearnet one. Then login to insta with that FB account. Your account might get restricted and you have to wait for a few months to lift it. You can also appeal to them.
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This is the way. I got my phone set up in eSIM and just pop SIMs like Pez
How does that help? Anonymous SIMs haven’t been a thing for years.
Anonymous Sims still exist in abundance. Cash for SIM cards is a big thing everywhere I’ve been.
But the IMSI doesn’t change so it’s not really anonymous if your phone is tied to identity. Just depends on your threat model
First - the thing that is persistent with a phone is IMEI, IMSI is the one in the simcard. Second - “cash for sims” is not legal in many places, like where I live. There are places that sell illegal anonymous ones (not like you can get in trouble for that tho), but idk how reliable these actually are, and I still haven’t learned to find these places consistently.
I can go to Target right now and pay in cash for a mint SIM. Where are you?
Target is USA though. A ton of countries have such policy.
In countries other than in the US, this is a major problem (I am aware of this, having spent some time in Asia)
In Germany and Spain and I suspect in the whole eu you have to show your id when you buy a sim and they register it to you.
Indeed. It is only really in the US where this is possible.
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Honestly those services are bad for privacy anyway. Its a good excuse to look for alternatives
Just yesterday wanted to create a new Gitlab.com account to add an issue to a project, the stupid thing not only required an email and a phone number, the bastards wanted a credit card
Just closed the site and went away instead. How is this considered okay to open a damn free account?
Credit card sounds real shitty but they probably require a phone number to make sure people don’t just create more accounts for free CI minutes.
Yeah is insane lately
Unless you in an area that requires an ID to purchase prepaid SIM cards you could go that route. The issue would be when you need to log back into an account, it gets flagged, and you need to reuse that number for verification purposes.
This is why it’s critical to set up two-factor on the account once you register. Pass keys, fido2 keys, etc.
This is so you can authenticate the account without the phone number. Just remember all of these systems are designed to the people can change their phone numbers, or when they lose their phones, etc you just have to provide enough factors so that they’re confident it’s actually you logging in.
I think it was from one of the many communities here that I found out about juicysms.com
Haven’t had the need to use their services yet but they look legit.
just dont use those services? even if you find a way to bypass this, you wont get anything out of it, they will still collect all of your data such as your location, device information etc.
I find that interesting, as there should be ways to only use email.
I’d say your IP or DNS is freaking them out. Sometimes when you have really good opsec on a browser, they can tell and will ask for weird shit like that.
I’d use a different browser, like maybe download Brave or Chromium or Librewolf (leave it out of the box) specifically for this stuff, assuming you use FireFox.
You can also download 3rd party clients for Facebook on Android, Insta is kinda a lost cause tho.
Edit: It’s not on F-Droid, you gotta hop on Github, but there is a client for Discord known as Aliucord on Android.
