Spam calls are incredibly annoying and while many modern smartphones have tools to help you manage them, the root cause traces back to how it’s difficult to do anything online nowadays without sharing your phone number. That’s where Surfshark’s new “Alternative Number” feature comes in, allowing you to easily mask your real phone number without missing any vital information. Here’s how it works.
Whether it’s an online shopping order, signing up for a social media account, or anything else online, you’ve likely had to hand over your phone number for some reason lately. While that can be useful for getting updates on an order or for other purposes, it also comes with risk. Your phone number is linked to you and hard to change, so when a company sells your number or gets hacked, your phone number ends up on lists where it will be flooded with spam calls and texts.
Surfshark’s new Alternative Number feature is designed to get around this, allowing you to use online services with a real phone number that forwards to your device, all without exposing your own number.
This works through the Surfshark app, where you can generate an Alternative Number that can be used anywhere. This number works for phone calls and text messages (but not authentication codes). It’s great for getting those text subscription discounts that are so prevalent at online retailers, for example.
More importantly, by using this alternative number, you can avoid robocalls and spam as the number can be refreshed every 30 days.
There are some really good alternate use cases for this as well. You can use this service for work-life balance, to keep your work calls and texts separate from your personal ones. You can also use this for dating apps, to avoid giving up your real number if the relationship isn’t going anywhere. Small businesses could also find this number useful for one-off communications with customers. The possibilities are really endless.
Another huge benefit is that you can use this service to keep connected when traveling abroad, as the alternate number will still work with Wi-Fi or data SIMs without any added fees from your carrier.
Surfshark includes Alternative Number as a standard feature of its VPN plans, meaning you’re getting two privacy-focused features at a very low cost in the same app. As an added bonus, you’ll also get “Alternative ID” with these plans, which lets you create email addresses to mask your real one and further avoid spam and privacy risks.
Alternative Number is available in Surfshark Starter, One, and One+ plans which start at just $3.49/month with a 24-month plan ($4.99/month with 12-month plans).
- Get Alternative Number with Surfshark
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