In our previous article, we discussed great services for getting long term anonymous phone numbers and cell service. Now we’ll discuss temporary or one-time “burner” SMS verification services.
The purpose of this is getting a one-time verification text to sign up for some service without providing any of your identifying information. You would get a lot out of subscribing for free to our new content by email, by Session messenger, RSS feed, or Nostr.
We’ll review:
1) JMB.Chat
2) SMS.usmobilenumbers.com
3) SMS-Man.com
4) VirtualSim.net
5) Tips in General
JMB.Chat
In our previous article we recommended JMB.Chat, which is so inexpensive ($3 per month, $15 minimum) and private that you might wonder what the point of the rest of the list is.
Unfortunately all your accounts with JMB will show up as JMB on the caller ID. This could link your different accounts or activities with Big Tech, phone companies, unconstitutional government mass surveillance, or even the people you’re calling and texting.
Also you might not want to maintain a regular phone line and pay the $15 up front fee just for a one-time SMS verification registration. JMB.chat will require you to download an open source XMPP client, while as the other ones discussed in this article are all websites. And finally, JMB.chat only services US and Canadian numbers. So while we love JMB.chat, it’s good to have a variety of other choices and competition.
SMS.usmobilenumbers.com
Privacy Rating: 8 of 10
Convenience Rating: 9 of 10
Requires KYC?: No
Accepts Crypto: Yes
Accepts Monero: Yes
Requires App?: No
Onion Service?: No
Requires Email?: Yes
Requires Javascript?: Yes
Third Party Payments?: Yes, CoinPayments.net
Link:
https://sms.usmobilenumbers.com/
SMS.usmobilenumbers is our favorite service of the ones listed on this page. It offers a pretty quick sign-up and purchase using a phone number that works for most services (e.g., Gmail, Twitter, Protonmail, and Discord).
There’s no KYC, but you’ll have to give an email – the only major annoyance. SMS.usmobilenumbers also accepts Monero and other cryptocurrencies through the third party payment provider CoinPayments.net. This payment provider is reliable, is pretty fast, and doesn’t ban Tor. There’s no .onion service though.
The only disadvantage of this service is that the way its pricing is set up, you’ll want to verify a few accounts at once, but then this would connect the activity on these different services. So if you have to buy a pack of credits for $10 just to do one really private account, it’s very expensive. If on the other hand, having these different accounts connected isn’t that big a deal to you, then the pricing is good.
The service is overall easy to use and the numbers won’t get rejected by most services. If you do get rejected from a site, try switching your VPN from Wireguard to OpenVPN and the port to 443. (This is the case with Twitter’s registration.) Also, try matching the VPN location with the area code of the phone number.
With this service, the numbers are United States only, which has pros and cons. The pro is that US numbers are accepted by more services without question because they are usually more difficult to get. The negative is that it makes it subject to the US government doing illegal unconstitutional mass surveillance.
The customer support for SMS.usmobile is very good. We got immediate support, even at an odd time of day and a refund of credits for a website that rejected the given number. Make sure to take a screenshot of any rejections to show to customer service.
The only reason we don’t rate SMS.usmobile 10 out of 10 for privacy is because they only have United States numbers, they require an email, javascript, and they do not support .onion Tor service. Also note that while they offer long term rentals, the prices are horrible, so we don’t recommend them for this purpose.
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SMS-man.com
Privacy Rating: 6 of 10
Convenience Rating: 6 of 10
Requires KYC?: No
Accepts Crypto: Yes
Accepts Monero: No
Requires App?: No
Onion Service?: No
Requires Email?: Yes
Requires Javascript?: Yes
Third Party Payments?: Yes, Coinbase which bans Tor
Link:
The biggest positive of SMS-Man is the wider selection of countries, which allows you to be outside the stricter mass surveillance of the US. SMS-Man.com supports phone numbers in the Philippines, Germany, Russia, and many more.
The biggest negative of SMS-Man is that it uses Coinbase as its payment provider, and Coinbase bans Tor. Also SMS-Man uses Cloudflarefor its DDoS, and Cloudflare has a stick up its ass about Tor. Cloudflare will allow Tor use on SMS-Man.com but it loads incredibly slowly.
The way around this restriction is to use a VPN after connecting with a Tor Router. This would enable you to access the less monitored foreign numbers offered by SMS-Man without the annoying Coinbase restriction on Tor use.
SMS-Man requires an email, and Coinbase won’t accept Monero. Overall its customer service is responsive and the numbers are accepted by most websites.
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VirtualSim.net
Privacy Rating: 8 of 10
Convenience Rating: 5 of 10
Requires KYC?: No
Accepts Crypto: Yes
Accepts Monero: Yes
Requires App?: No
Onion Service?: Not directly, but they are on AlphaBay which is an illegal site that we can’t link to
Requires Email?: No
Requires Javascript?: No!
Third Party Payments?: No
Link:
The selection of countries on VirtualSim.net for phone numbers is pretty good and include:
Poland
Russia
Ukraine
United Kingdom
Cambodia
Kazakhstan
VirtualSim.net offers one-time texts for $2, and $15 a month dedicated lines. That’s pretty good pricing.
VirtualSim.net is the only website on this list that doesn’t require javascript – a huge plus for privacy. But this website is very inconvenient because it makes you go through a manual payment confirmation before giving you the product. This means that the website will provide you with a Monero address but to actually verify that you paid and give you the product, it has a human review and then send the information through your account.
However, besides the delay in the payment processing, the service is pretty convenient and good otherwise.
The bonus of its payment system is that VirtualSim.net does the payments themselves, so you won’t have to worry about a third party with data or Tor bans. Another nice part of this website is that it doesn’t require an email.
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Can you trust anyone?
We have no way to verify or authenticate who’s behind ANY third party SMS service. Nobody can be trusted if you’re really trying hard to be anonymous. So when using this type of service, you’ll be required to make an account to which you’ll deposit cryptocurrency. Be careful about which different services/accounts you verify on the same SMS service account because it connects all this different activity. For example if you verify an “anonymous” Gmail and then verify a Protonmail account with your real name, then the Gmail account has it’s privacy compromised and will no longer be really anonymous.
Legal Disclaimer:
Please note: We do not encourage criminal activity. There are a variety of other reasons to want to be anonymous or private.
For Google use:
If you use this SMS service for Google, once you get control of the account, you will need to remove phone number as a verification method and add an email instead.
Conclusion
The main benefit of these types of SMS verification services is that it enables you to hide your location and thus your identity. But you should only be using SMS verification if you HAVE to. In our next article, we’ll go over how to avoid using phones altogether for two factor authentication (2FA). We want to provide uncensored content off Youtube or Big Tech, so consider subscribing for free to our new content by email, by Session messenger, RSS feed, or Nostr.