Fucking morons. I’ve been looking for a new apartment and messaging a ton of real estate agents lately, and WhatsApp just decided to block me for ‘suspicious activity.’ They already restricted my account a couple of days ago, and I almost missed an apartment viewing because of it. And I‘ve already done that for three moves before with zero issues. I live in a country where literally all communication with real estate agents happens on WhatsApp, so now I’ll have to go out tomorrow and get a whole new phone number if they don’t unblock me or Im gonna end up on the street. Fucking morons. Fuck you, Crapsapp, and your piece-of-shit messenger
In the country I live you can‘t pay to real estate agents (it‘s prohibited). They are getting paid by the landlords, plus the rental market is pretty scarce so usually they don‘t give a fuck about you as they have a ton of inquiries from other potential renters
Effectively, they are getting paid by you, landlords factors that fee into the rent. But I get the point that the market favours landlords where you live and you might not have the privilege to ask for accommodations like communicating over SMS. This WhatsApp situation is fucked up, that your basic life functionality depends on a single unaccountable commercial entity.
My practical advice would be to buy an eSIM with a new number, there are very cheap options (like one used for travel) and you would practically need it just one time to get a verification code.
OP would also have to buy a new smartphone and activate it in a cafe or anywhere not their current location (due to both the GPS/AGPS and wi-fi hotspot MAC address), otherwise whatsapp would straight up lock the new account, too, given how these PII (geolocation, wi-fi hotspot and, especially, the device) are tied to an account that got suspended earlier (and this goes against most of plafforms’ terms regarding “ban evasion”). Hard resetting the smartphone doesn’t work, as smartphones have unique identifiers (such as the phone’s wi-fi adapter MAC), and using the same wi-fi may add to the factors leading to automatic locking of the account.
!mildlyinfuriating@lemmy.world
They might be trying to detect ban evasion in various ways, but at least since Android 10 (released 2019), the OS restricts app access to non-resettable identifiers. That being said, Meta is known for dirty tricks, so simply using another phone number may indeed not be enough.