Comment by girvo
6 months ago
> Buy phone & service in cash
Step one is already difficult here in Australia: to do so you must hand over your personal details and ID. At least that was true for anything with a SIM card for sale back in the 2010s
So the “step 0” was “find a retailer who didn’t follow the rules”, and they’d usually be a corner store selling handsets or SIM cards by the bucket load to all sorts of interesting characters
This was already the case in Australia as early as 2003. I distinctly remember being shocked that I had to provide ID when I bought a phone from a store for the first time.