When porting a number to Google Voice, is my old number still tied to my identity? The reason for changing my cell number is so that this guy isn’t able to tie a “known” cell number of mine, to me and use it for Con-scams. (I hope I am explaining that well enough).
I searched but cannot get the answer.
Yep.
Your old number is tied to you forever basically through a few ways:
- Your old number was likely in data breaches of some kind, mailing lists, or used to sign up for accounts. Assume this info will never be deleted.
- Its safe to assume if you are using Google voice, Google knows who you are. This might or might not affect your risk model.
(Unless it was a prepaid burner phone, bought cash, never used to create accounts or sign up for mailing lists)
Wow. I understand. Thank you for this info.
Main thing is to avoid exposing personal data as much as possible. You might Google your name/phone number/address and see if any data brokers have it publicly available. If they do you can opt out of having your data listed. You should also use a password manager to make sure all your accounts have unique and long passwords. A lot of them will also warn you about passwords that show up in data breaches which is the kind of thing a criminal might be accessing. Also try go through and delete any old accounts you might not use anymore since any extra accounts could mean potential data breaches or any other number of possible unintentional public data exposures.