How to Set up the Best Fake Phone Number
When you’re in a situation where you need to distract someone, fake phone numbers are a wonderful thing. Whether you come up with them locally or give a number to a service such as a hotline for rejection, providing a fake number can shorten an awkward social meeting. The best ones, however, are those you create yourself, like the one I gave to car dealerships that spoofs a complete voicemail message.
When I was in the market for a new car, I read this article by Yalopnik on dodging calls from thirsty dealers . He offered to get a Google Voice number. Well, I already use Google Voice for other purposes and the service doesn’t give you unlimited numbers. Recording apps are another option, but at this point you can just grab a number from Twilio and have some fun with it.
I mainly used my number to access TrueCar pricing reports. Service requires a phone number and email address, and then once you ask for one price, every car dealer in the area will crawl out of the way to contact you. I didn’t want to block calls all the time and didn’t want to send them to a friend’s number. I just wanted their calls to disappear on the air, never reach me, never return, but disappear like a stone thrown into fog. Fortunately, there is a way out.
How to set up your fake number
First, sign up for a Twilio account , which is free. You can also reserve your first phone number for free, although anyone who calls or SMS will hear a message that this is a free trial Twilio account . You can stop there if you like. False number reached.
But here’s the fun part. When you click your phone number preferences in the Twilio dashboard, you can tell the service what it should do when someone calls or text messages that number. By default, it reads a small message (that you haven’t set a number or something). I copied this message and modified it to sound like a full voicemail box. Here’s my scenario:
<Response><Say voice="alice">You have reached. 5 5 5. 5 5 5. 1 2 1 2. Please leave a message after the tone.</Say><Pause length="1"/><Say voice="alice"> This mailbox is full. </Say></Response>
You’re not fooling anyone with a free trial message, so I paid $ 1 a month for the number plus fractions of a cent per minute ($ 0.0015). In total, my fake number received 38 calls, which means I dodged many car dealers for a total of less than two dollars.
Have more fun
You can of course write a script that says whatever you want. You can create your own opt-out hotline or read a funny poem. You can actually let them leave a message if that’s the thing you want. You can even write a script so that the cute robot lady can talk to your caller.
It all works with texts as well. You can connect people sending text to your Twilio number using a chatbot, possibly written on the easy-to-use Dexter platform . You can have some fun with your new fake number, from bizarre to wicked. Choose wisely.
This story was originally published in 2018 and has been updated with new information on 02/24/2020.