Comment by _heimdall
2 years ago
I do basically this with a subscription to MySudo. I always get funny looks when giving out a number, living in a small town people are surprised when it isn't one of the two or three area codes around here.
It works like a charm though. I have three tiers of numbers - one that I'll keep and goes to only friends and family, one that I will likely keep for a couple years until it starts getting too much spam, and a third tier that I cycle regularly and use for one off things like online orders.
Distant area code SIMs do wonders.
I was still living in Vancouver, Canada when I learned maybe six or so years ago AT&T has removed all roaming restrictions in North America. So a few of us banded together, one of us crossed over to New York picked up a group subscription of sorts and we had very cheap subscriptions. Only the last 1-2 years did Canadian providers caught up, somewhat.
But the real advantage was if anyone called from a "local" number, local to my SIM at least, I immediately knew it was spam. I do not know anyone in Buffalo, I do not do business in Buffalo, there's no authority which has anything to do with me there, nothing. It's spam.
Reminds me of my parents... they live close enough to the US border that they just have a US cell phone plan. The plan is $50/mo/line USD and includes unlimited data/calling/text in Canada/US/Mexico. But because they live so close they're not actually roaming most of the time, and they're snow birds so they're in the US half the year anyway. They found the same thing as you... any calls from the same area code as their phone numbers was definitely not for them since it was somewhere very far away and they don't have any business there.