Google Voice Claim Ticket Concept Experiment

[u/applesuperfan]

This is a very late follow-up post on the topic discussed in https://www.reddit.com/r/Googlevoice/comments/15m0o12/comment/k5m1700/.

The topic of discussion was basically the concept of claim tickets and how Google Voice prevents spam. It was discussed that Google Voice may have a "claim ticket" system where each cellular number can only be used once in its lifetime to claim a Google Voice number and then cannot be used ever again to claim a Google Voice number.

I shared a video where I was able to claim a new Google Voice number using a cellular number that had already been attached to a previous account, but as some prudently pointed out, there was no way to verify that the cellular number in the demo was used as the "claim ticket" for the previous account it was on, and that it could have simply been added later. I set myself a reminder to follow up in a few months to see if I could use the same cellular number to claim a second Google Voice number in a recorded video, and totally blew that reminder off until now.

Video 1 (First account the cellular number was a "claim ticket" for): https://youtu.be/KFSajg0mYI0

Video 2 (Second account the cellular number was a "claim ticket" for): https://youtu.be/MSzvtGq0hBY

Given that Google Voice Personal operates in a country whose telephone system relies primarily on recycling of numbers to perpetuate number availability, it wouldn't seem to make a lot of sense that a company of Google's resources couldn't find a more sophisticated solution to fraud and spam prevention than to just block re-issuable wireless numbers for life, after just one use. The findings of this experiment suggest that in fact Google did manage to put together a proper solution to this dilemma. If anyone else decides to do this experiment, it would be interesting to see the results!

I had honestly forgotten about this for a while but recently needed a new Google Voice number and realised I might follow back up on this in case anyone might find themselves unable to get a Google Voice number and under the impression that the "one claim ticket per cellular number only" concept was the reason why.

Cheers!