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Is everyone who uses a VIOP number a scammer? No.

But does just about every scammer use a VOIP number? Yes.

For instance, A VOIP number that spoofs a US or other area code but is coming from Nigeria is a favorite tool of so called “romance scammers”. And these scammers are getting good at using AI to impersonate American accents and even using photos stolen off social media with AI to make it look like that person is talking to the victim over a video chat.

Scammers Can Be At Any Place They Want! #shorts
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/aZpA3H327Yo

Scammers and VoIP: What you need to know about illegal phone scams
https://www.voipreview.org/blog/scammers-and-voip-what-you-need-know-about-illegal-phone-scams

But VOIP numbers are also used to scam businesses into accepting orders and deliveries with 30-day net terms from a fake company that is spoofing the real company’s email address and using a VOIP number that spoofs the real company’s phone number.

Once they ship the order, often to a 3rd party recipient, that person re-ships the product overseas, often to some country in Africa, and the company never receives payment.

I suspect this can be why some companies don’t want to accept orders from an unverifiable VOIP number.

Fighting Back Against Business Impersonators!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxTBa97u1d8

At a previous company a scammer impersonating one of our large and important vendors sent an email to our AP department informing us that they had changed banks and provided new ACH payment instructions. That email also had a fake number that was a VOIP number spoofing the actual company’s number. To the AP manager, the email looked legit and calling the number provided in the email, everything seemed to check out. But the company got scammed for over $50k before it was discovered.

After I started my new job in corporate Payroll at the end of last year, it only took a week before I started getting emails from several of our “executives” asking about changing their direct deposit account. Scams and spoofed emails - every one of them.

I was also getting emails allegedly from one of our employees that said something like “I am in a very important meeting out of town right now but urgently need your assistance and some information for this meeting, please call me on my cell phone at xxx-xxx-xxxx ASAP!” (likely a VOIP number). I reported it to IT and sent it to the spam folder. But the scammer was persistent, and I kept getting these emails about once a week for months.

The thing was this employee, while he shared the last name of the company’s original founder (and that family no longer owns or has anything to do with the current company), he was in no way related and was certainly not someone who would be at out-of-town meeting on company business and needing what I presume was payroll or some other financial information.

The guy was an hourly production worker, he worked in the packaging department boxing cookies and other confectionary products.

“if many major companies can deal with it easily, why do others make it such a problem?”

Because the scammers are often impersonating nationally well-known companies but like to target smaller companies who may not have the resources and tech savvy to check out the legitimacy of the phone number. And if they’ve been burned before by a scammer using a VOIP number, they may be more resistant to taking orders from a company they’ve not worked with before especially if that company has a VOIP number.

Similarly, many companies will also not or make it difficult to open a line of credit or accept shipments with 30-day net terms from a company with a gmail, yahoo, AOL or similar email accounts.

You think these companies are just being a PITA to you personally, but you may want to look at it from their perspective.