Laravel simple-sms

I try to make, send SMS using simple-sms Laravel package. Then user activated he get sms message with text: Activated!, but i dont getting sms by tag $phone, if i use phone like that: "+4425652125", everything works fine. My code looks like that:

public function activate($token, User $user)
{
    $user = User::whereActivationToken($token)->firstOrFail();
    $user->confirmEmail();
    $phone = $user->phone;

    flash()->success(trans('frontend.account.activated'));

    SMS::send('Your SMS Message', null, function($sms) {
        $sms->to('$phone');
    });
}

Any ideas?

via ром Макаров