Trying to sign up to BUY Visual Studio licenses for our org but keep getting " We’re unable to validate your phone number"

Question

We are trying to to sign up for Office Development program to develop our own Office Add-ins for our customers.

Unfortunately to do that we need some valid licenses for Visual Studio... so we happily go to the website to buy two license, however signup is blocked by not a single one of us being able to verify our phone numbers during signup?!?

We tried 3 different people with many different phone number formats that works in all other services, but no, we get "We’re unable to validate your phone number"

And we are trying to do this from Sweden, not some odd country with shady phone numbers etc

Also googling, a LOT of people have this issue for a long time?!?

Seriously, Microsoft, what are you guys doing??

This is a basic step in buying something from you and its being blocked by this issue?

Its frankly embarrassing for a large corporation to fail something this basic.

WE as a fairly small company offer our own services to all of the world, and we manage to validate phone numbers for our customers without this issue.