Schnides
Highly dubious business practices, criminally negligent customer service
I used this company for a few years to provide a virtual business number for a client of mine who is based in Germany but travels a lot. He wanted a fixed local number that redirected to his mobile if he was out of the office. A perfectly reasonable business case for a virtual number. At first the service was OK, despite a few glitches with the awful dashboard. However, last year things started to really go down the drain. I kept being contacted by someone claiming to be from World Numbers, although NOT from their official support email address, demanding photo ID in order to keep the number active. The demands made no sense and they were not able to contact me through the site's official channels, which I asked them to do many times. They threatened to cut off the number if I did not provide my client's photo ID (passport, business license, etc.) to an unknown person. This is ID that could easily be used to scam my client and I told them repeatedly I would not be cajoled into doing so and risk exposing my client to identity fraud. So they disconnected the number and kept the remaining call credit balance. This was a huge inconvenience to my client, not to mention the financial impact of having the main method of contact for prospects removed. Extremely unprofessional. Now I am being spammed every day because the original expiry date for the number is drawing near! Unbelievable, but it is the case. I have told them to cease and desist and stop spamming me, as I will NEVER use the company again after the way we were treated. But it is as if the company is run by badly written AI. You cannot get a cohesive answer, or even any answer from them. There are better options for telephone number virtualization than this company. I have had to create a dummy email address to switch out my details in order to stop being harrassed by their bots on a daily basis. Without a doubt the worst service I have ever used, and that is quite an achievement. They must be actively TRYING to inconvenience their customers, but the reasons for which, I could not even begin to speculate.