If your sign-up came from a network Quavern flags as higher-risk — a VPN, an anonymising proxy, a hosting provider, an address with a poor reputation — you are asked to verify a telephone number by SMS before the account opens.

No card is ever asked for. The card check that used to sit here was removed; a code by SMS replaced it everywhere. Nobody is asked for a payment method to open a free account.

The account is created, no tokens are issued yet, and a phone step appears in the same place in the flow. Enter a mobile number in international form, read the six-digit code, and continue.

You have a grace window of 24 hours: if you cannot receive an SMS right now, your account already exists — sign in again within that window and finish the step then.

The tier is decided from the network, not from you. Abuse arrives in bulk from a handful of network types, and a verified mobile number makes bulk expensive without making the ordinary case slower. Traffic from ordinary connections is not asked for anything.

A flagged network can also ask for an invisible captcha at a lower tier, and a flagged sign-in asks for a captcha rather than a number. A code by SMS is never asked for at sign-in because of the network alone — only when it is the account's own second step.

The same applies to authorising a new device, such as a Marl Code sign-in, when the approval comes from a flagged network: verify a number on the security page first. A routine sign-in from an ordinary network is not blocked.

One number can verify at most two accounts. The number is shown masked, never logged, and is cleared when you delete the account or its personal data.

"Verifying a telephone number and reading the code" covers the delivery problems. If the number itself is being refused, say so when you write, with the country it belongs to and whether you were behind a VPN.

Quavern help reference: signing-up-from-a-flagged-network/en