All of these services are sketchy. However, I think it would be beneficial to the community if criteria were developed and recommendations made regarding which of these services are the least sketchy.
SMS Pool is not sketchy at all. What do you mean?
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Smspool.net is actually good service, can fund with monero/bitcoin/lightning and you can get an account without email (just a string identifier)
Is there any reason @jonah we can’t recommend such services?
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I have used smspool a lot and it works great I would reccomend adding it.
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I’ve used 5sim before and its ok. Unfortunately, I’ve had numerous instances where I bought a number and it didn’t work (they give out refunds automatically if you don’t get any SMS after 15min). I think its the cheapest SMS verification service out there tho, so it kinda excuses the poor performance for me.
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That looks indeed quite good (and much more modern!) but they do not support monero, what a pity
They actually do, I guess they just removed it from public to not get unwanted attention. XMR was there few weeks ago lol.
Okay, that explains the “Pay instantly with Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and other cryptocurrencies.” while showing only the first three =D maybe it will come back, will keep an eye on them
Yup, u have to enter their dash for that. Anyways, hope I helped u.
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I am using 1001sms.com and its way better then others, they have too many operators available for various countries and providing success rate which saves me a time.
Works with Apple and Google?
Are there any ways to vet the trustworthiness of these companies other than their privacy policies? Maybe it’s just me, or that I have never used these kinds of services before, but I can’t help but feel that they are shady or insecure? Is there some minimum threshold or set of criteria like we have for email or cloud storage or messengers? All everyone here is doing is listing services, but OP is clearly asking for us to develop a sufficient criteria that indicates the service is private and secure.
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SMS Pool seems to use a single account number system like mullvad, allow tor, accept Monero. I don’t see how, even if it was insecure, it could impact you. Because there would be no way for smspool to know who you are, and verification codes are one time.
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Perhaps silent.link, cloaked, phreeli, and any others can be considered as well.
$235/yr ($18/28 days) for a non-VOIP US number that works for all services is not a bad price, and they DO accept XMR. I don’t like the fact that they use Stripe for their payments, including crypto payments. My experience has been that Stripe blocks payments coming from Tor exit nodes. Can anyone here comfirm that you have successfully paid for smspool using XMR over Tor?
Another issue is that their numbers cannot be used for financial services. If you need to receive an SMS code for banks, brokerage firms etc., textverified.com works for these.
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Not sure anyone would wan’t to admit to this, haha. Monero works the same over Tor, just slower. If you are talking about the website blocking Tor users, I doubt it.
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I find this price to be expensive. You could have 2 physical and 2 years of SMS in Canada.
I mean burners sims paid cashs with burner vouchers.
But I guess, you don’t live in USA or Canada ?
Last time I tried to use smspool to create a google account it prompted me to send a pre-defined SMS from my actual phone instead of entering a number. Would be great if smspool can add such a functionality.
What are the payment options accepted ?
It’s a bad idea to use these for accounts you’re going to use for a long time. I’ve seen someone who used one for their Apple account and then when they tried to recover it, they weren’t able to because they didn’t have access to the number.
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