Hello all, recently wanted to signup for temporary permanent legit emailmid in gmail. It was asking me Phone number in process, i tried to use multiple numbers from regular online resources ( more than 30) but nothing worked. I don't want to give my personal phone number in real life to someone's unless Its I want to.
How do I sign up services where phone number is required ? Is there throw away phone number I can get ? Is there way to skip it all together ( not on Gmail for sure )
Your help be appreciated.
Don't use services that require you to enter a phone number if you are not comfortable with the providers of those services having your phone number. Do without.
I use a 'burner' number with a prepaid provider that I pay $6 a month for, for all my "needs your phone number" bullshit. It's not a true burner since I'm holding it long-term, but it's a secondary number that I don't use unless I get a call or message on that number. Keeps my main/'real' number safe, from both data breaches and the weird manager at the pizza place or whatever.
If you can get away with a non North American number, most countries will give you a SIM for free or next to nothing and you pay only once for pre-paid service, no monthly fee.
You could always get a PAYG SIM as a secondary number.
This is what I do. It costs me 50 cents every few months to keep alive. I only loaded it with $5 of credit, so I can ditch the SIM and get a new one at any time. The provider I went with didn't ask for any personal details and only wanted payment.
My country is probably different to yours. But I just visited their store. You can order them online from their stores too.
PAYG is a little confusing these days because every network provider is advertising it as if it's a pre-paid monthly plan. Ie. Top up $10 every month to get x bundle. But they're just the same as back in the day; they just massively emphasize the deals you can get when you top up every month because they want as much money as possible.
If you read their terms and conditions, they state that the regular price for a text, a call, a MB of data is y when you haven't qualified for a bundle. Don't get me wrong, the out of bundle prices are shockingly expensive but if like me, you want it to mainly receive and very rarely send it's not that bad at all.
I use my PAYG SIM as a secondary SIM. It would be too expensive to use as my main SIM. For the same allowance, the best PAYG bundle I could find was twice the price as my regular monthly contract.
Sometimes if you go to a school, library, cafe, etc you might be able to create those accounts without phone number. This also might be because you're on VPN. I created a new google account at school for whatever reason. Haven't had the need to use it yet but it's there.
Use a service like IronVest that gives you masked email addresses, masked (virtual) credit cards, and a masked phone number. $39/year $6/month. There might be better cheaper alternatives. https://ironvest.com/