This essentially doesn’t work now either, unfortunately.

A lot of the latest AAA games will only allow you to play multiplayer if your account ALSO has a verified phone number attached, and they only let you attach each number to a single account, plus they filter out phones which are not postpaid (so no using services like Twilio).

> A lot of the

No. Overwatch 2 did this and rolled it back pretty much immediately. CS:GO and DOTA2 don't require it but it they gate competitive play behind it. That's not a lot of AAA games.

MW2(022), the game in question in this post, also requires a phone number linked to your account.

Ubisoft has also added this to Siege.

My god. Any company doing that enters in my do-not-buy-ever list.

How do they differentiate prepaid and postpaid phone numbers?

Is there some way they can check with the provider for a given number? Seems less than ideal from a privacy perspective.

When they launched Overwatch 2, you couldn't play if you tried to verify your account with a prepaid phone. This was problematic since they closed Overwatch 1 servers (it's a paid, online only game) for Overwatch 2, a free to play game.

Some people found themselves that they could no longer play the Overwatch franchise after having bought the $40 original game because of this. This was later rolled back and they allowed prepaid phones. So they can definitely distinguish them.

Something like this is how many companies approach it: https://developer.telesign.com/enterprise/docs/phone-id-iden...

There are APIs that can provide that information.

I can pick up 20 free SIMs from my local phone store...

Chargeback should be last resort, compagny pay for it and will basically close everything related to that account / credit card.

Chargeback should be a last resort but it should also be something you can reliably fall back on if the company fails to handle your complaint adequately. And the likes of Google seem to do that 100% of the time.