I have tried to help multiple people create an account and every time we get to phone number (four different unique numbers of people who didn't even know what steemit was) we enter the number, it texts the code, we enter the code and get a screen that says "phone number has already been used".
I believe this has to be some sort of glitch in the system for it to happen with 4 different numbers?
So . . .I bought some steem, figured out how to load it into my account and used the pay to create (6 steem currently @$1.57USD) to create their accounts for them and then showed them how to change the password.
No idea where to go to get an answer to this riddle so I am posting it here. Anyone?