> Supposedly, using the QR code on the smartphone triggers an SMS sent from your phone to Google in order to verify your phone number.
Does anyone have a better source of information than this one forum comment from someone who thinks scanning a QR code is enough to get your phone to send a text message?
EDIT: It’s just an SMS URI. It doesn’t automatically send anything, just opens a text message for you to send.
This is just the old phone number verification with a QR code convenience method.
I did some work with Verizon and an IoT customer was asking about SMS pricing and the VZ guys laughed and said it cost less than a penny for every 1M SMS.
Exchanging SMS messages with any sort of reliability (like not losing your messages when you go through a tunnel) requires running an SMSC. That costs money.
Furthermore, carriers still charge each other for exchanging SMS traffic, though many of them just charge the difference rather than sending each other bills.
This approach is quite costly if you're out of the country, though. Sending an SMS is hit and miss when roaming in foreign enough networks, and each SMS can cost you a significant amount for exchanging 10 characters. Even receiving SMS messages far away from home can cost you money, which is a pain if you have a relative that could never get used to modern messaging services.
Technically if you can copy paste the qr code into any qr reader website and manually do it, I think it's possible? Assuming it doesn't change the code very rapidly every few seconds.
The elder gods have declared that you have been unpersoned... until you buy a new phone.
Also try squeezing the phone at various points to see if it pops the internal connector back in. You can find a repair video to see where the connector is.
Interesting. Each of the rear cameras has a separate connector. It's not like the older Samsung phones where all the cameras on on a separate daughterboard with a single connector.
I wonder if I could find a camera app that lets me select a different camera at app startup. The built in app closes with an error, unless I long click it and select "Take a selfie".
Ha, it worked! After opening in selfie mode, I can select manual mode in the stock camera app and use a different rear camera. But if I accidentally use the wrong settings, the whole app closes with an error.
The old method was for you to receive an SMS. Because it's easy to pay a phone farm 30 cents to receive an SMS now, they're changing it to sending. Phone farms will also adapt.
I think it's probably enough to get your phone to open your texting app with a pre populated number and message body, then all the user needs to do is hit send.
I wish it was. I've looked everywhere for several years for anyone offering this service so I can get into my 2004 Google account that they enabled SMS 2FA on one day, without any notice, but it has the wrong phone number. I have the username, password and the recovery email address is set to another I own too, but without the SMS code I'm hosed.
You should just determine which carrier hosts the phone number and then go get a job there as a customer service agent or store employee. You'll get full permissions to change accounts, so you'll be able to make the change, fix your gmail, then change it back.
You probably risk some legal fallout though, so be cautious.
This reminds me of the women who sleep with Meta employees to get their accounts unlocked. It's 2026, we gotta do what we gotta do to get our digital lives back.
I recall reading that twitter was getting "scammed" because there were some phone services that cost money to receive texts (and possibly some of it was being passed on to the customer of said phone service) and they were getting spammed with phone verifications to get the payouts. I guess when twitter extorts your phone number out of you under false security pretenses and then uses it for advertising that's legit but if some one tries to a get a cut for themselves it's a big problem.
It occurs to me this "force you to send the sms" might be a way to avoid exactly this sort of thing.
They used to do just that, though people could pay about $25-30 (in like, 2008 dollars! So that’s closer to $47 today) for ‘unlimited text plans’.
I know you mean charge just these bulk senders, but if they didn’t charge consumers a similar rate too, whoever wants to spam SMS can just set up farms of consumer SIMs and dump them onto the network that way. In fact, they already do this.
Does anyone have a better source of information than this one forum comment from someone who thinks scanning a QR code is enough to get your phone to send a text message?
EDIT: It’s just an SMS URI. It doesn’t automatically send anything, just opens a text message for you to send.
This is just the old phone number verification with a QR code convenience method.