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The war against privacy: governments coming after anonymous SMS receiving services
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this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2025
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Privacy
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The UN thing was stupid, it peddled a story about disabling the phone network bla bla. The real purpose of those sim banks is various forms of illicit scraping or click fraud, signing up for 100's of fake SMS verified Facebook accounts so you can run sales scams, etc. That sounds like the nature of the thing that was just busted.
If would be nice if we could trust government and media. It's tricky.
The news article was about a specific incident in the EU and idk if it generalizes to "governments" but yes, sim farms, and in some cases racks full of real phones running apps, really do exist, mostly for skeezy if not criminal purposes. It's not like some privacy conscious rando having a few burner phones for whatever. If they have 10,000 active phone numbers terminated in a warehouse, they are up to something sus.
The article is about an EU incident, but something similar happened recently in the US.
The article also mentioned names of 2 websites which anyone could use. IDK about you, in my country there's no such thing as a burner because of ID requirements and using services like this, paid with monero, is the only way to create an account privately without resorting to criminal activity such as using fake IDs.
The thing in the US was about a sim farm in New York and the reporting was pretty stupid from what I could tell. At present you can get US mobile phones and sims without ID. Also, most services that send sms validation don't care if it's a real mobile number. I use a VoIP number and it's usually fine.
If you're using a hosted sim to forward SMS to your real phone # or email, you have to expect that a determined or powerful enough opponent will link the two. What happens then probably depends on what you were doing.
Not my experience, the last time I had to use my provider's real SIM SMS service was when registering with a local taxi hail app.
Yeah I don't currently use any ride hailing apps and haven't posted to Craigslist in ages. Some services will be more paranoid than others. Depends on how much fraud they encounter I guess.
It's also used to offer cheap sms service to shady aggregators or mobile network operators. These phones will have a free sms subscription and they send incoming otp SMS s through to end users for say half the normal price of an otp SMS. 100% profit.
Interesting though as you say, also shady. Also seems marginal. Sending enough SMS to recover the monthly cost of the SIM cards seems likely to get the carriers' attention after a while. Outbound SMS from Twilio are around 0.8 cents each in the US fwiw. Much less hassle. Maybe even less from carriers. No idea about EU.