International mobile phone for verification?

[GMH1]

My financial institutions are mostly all in the United States, but I am living abroad. PayPal isn't allowing me to enter my non-US mobile phone number in Settings, and when I need to receive a text to confirm a transaction, I'm forced to switch SIM cards in order to receive the text on my US phone - which is very inconvenient!  I changed the settings for 2-step verification to use an authenticator app, but it's still asking to send me a security code via text to my mobile phone. Help, please!

[WarrenPink]

Hello @GMH1

I hope you're doing well! 

PayPal SMS security verification will always default with the primary phone number on file and SMS verification is always the number one presented option for verification. In order to stop this, you will need to set the phone you prefer as the primary contact number and you have to take out the US phone number. You can also reach customer service to get all this sorted out. Hope this helps! 

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[GMH1]

Thank you for your message. It took me a few days to get back to my computer to try this. 

Unfortunately, it doesn't work. Same as before: PayPal is not allowing me to enter a non-US number. The only options are simply to enter a 10-digit number, with the country code implied as +1 for the US. This is not the case with me. 

Just to clarify, when I go to Settings > Phone > Update, it gives me two fields: Phone Type and Phone number. The Phone Number field is numbers-only. This field does not allow for the entry of an international number.

[GMH1]

I spent roughly an hour yesterday in a frustrating chat with a Paypal employee who, in typo-ridden short messages, took far too long to understand my problem, and offer me any sort of clarity until the very end, when he essentially said that the system is set up so that US accounts can only have US-based phone numbers attached to them for verification.

This is extremely inconvenient. All of my transactions are taking place within the US - the money is being transferred to me, a US citizen, from a US-based individual, and I am transferring this money to my US-based bank account. It is only I who am located overseas, and in order to receive verification codes from PayPal via SMS, I need to remove my local sim card and insert my US sim card, upon which I am charged $10 in roaming charges for the day. That's essentially a $10 surcharge for me to transfer money. 

Unacceptable that this is the only way to make Paypal work in my situation. I will look for another service if this is the case. 

[handyman-cabibn]

I agree. Whoever PayPal executive who invented this kind of verification didn't think about it carefully. Many people who use PayPal are working online and many of them are Digital Nomads. Their business can be based in a certain country but they move out and about, how then can they access their PayPal account based in the US when they are in one of the beaches in Spain? Are still bound to use their US mobile number that charges them every time PayPal send them a verification text? The PayPal executive should have thought about this and use verified 'EMAIL' instead of mobile phone.