Long story short, every local carrier in my country has succumbed to ID verification on prepaid numbers due to a law passing here and they set different deadlines on older phone numbers getting scrapped if they don’t get verified
My country is: Cyprus
Now I’m scrambling what to do, I thought one carrier was at least safe but I was wholly wrong.
I only have an SMSPool account and that’s about it but 20 bucks per 28 days for a extendable rent it is quite the ask especially when I used to maintain a number for 5 bucks a year.
jmp.chat seems to also be an option and I think there was another one who was selling anonymous SIMs.
Either way appreciated the thoughts I am receiving in this little challenging time…
jmp.chat (for the number) with silent.link (for the data only esim) seemed the best option from my searches as you can pay both with crypto, and silent.link has a very good price per gb (atleast compared to other options I could find)
My idea is to use something like silent.link for data, and to get a phone number, I use a VOIP service that’s popular in my country (kompaas.tech to be exact, planning on doing a review on it - it does have phone numbers from many countries, but for now, not Cyprus), rent a phone number from them and pair it up with the open source Linphone app.
So yeah, I also thought about using jmp.chat, but using a US number in my country seems a little far fetched for me. My recommendation is to try to find a VOIP provider that supports Cyprus phone numbers.
First, I wish you were a little more detailed with how you want to use this phone number. Naturally, I would think you’d like to make and receive calls and texts along with anything else one can do with a phone number. Right?
And I am also guessing you don’t mind having a number with a different country code than yours.
Based on these assumptions, I would recommend JMP.chat. It works well. The Cheogram app is great for this. It’s harder to use on iOS. And JMP is affordable enough for all that it offers and you can also make the odd phone call (albeit, you’d have to check the pricing for the country code of the each number you want to dial to see how many minutes you have every month since its different depending on the country).
I’ve been using it for several months now and don’t have any major complaints.