'+' sign in front of sms seems to preclude creating a contact

I could create a contact from a sms message without a '+' I typed in manually in chats, but could not from the second (inbound) sms that has a '+' before the number.

purism-librem-5-evergreen-add-to-contact-plus-sign-2020-11-15

purism@pureos:~$ dpkg -s chatty
Package: chatty
Status: install ok installed
Priority: optional
Section: net
Installed-Size: 954
Maintainer: Mohammed Sadiq <sadiq@sadiqpk.org>
Architecture: arm64
Version: 0.1.17
Depends: dconf-gsettings-backend | gsettings-backend, libc6 (>= 2.17), libcairo2 (>= 1.2.4), libebook-1.2-19 )
Recommends: purple-carbons, purple-lurch, purple-mm-sms, purple-xmpp-http-upload
Suggests: calls
Conffiles:
 /etc/xdg/autostart/sm.puri.Chatty-daemon.desktop 3517075850d0948065c3fcc033e17a43
Description: XMPP and SMS messaging
 Chatty is a chat application for XMPP and SMS using
 libpurple and Modemmanager.
Homepage: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/chatty
purism@pureos:~$