Anyone can hack your phone number, this is the what you can do!#

With the current carrier system globally any number is not safe, anyone who wants to get your location, intercept your calls and messages, can. I will link a few resources at the bottom if you want to learn how that works, but today I am focusing on what can be done to mitigate these issues.

Using “VoIP” number can prevent location leakage, I recommend jmp.chat, it has a great android client, and virtually any VoIP number can be integrated if it has exposed API’s, SIP etc.

Using no phone number is actually the best strategy but banks and other institutions use SMS as a verification method so you will need some kind of bridge, SMS can be intercepted by stringrays locally so using a VoIP number is better for that too.

If a voice call or an SMS is routed through PSTN (which is just copper i.e. plain text), anyone that knows what your number is, can spy on you.

phone number identifier

Though if you live in a country where PSTN has been shut down, good for you! eg. Germany, Netherlands.

The caveat Ofcourse is they should know that what your number is, if there is no KYC, chances are nobody can know it’s YOUR number.

If you are a frequent traveller here’s a nice article.

jmp.chat shines here as well, as they don’t ask for any PII when onboarding US, Canadian numbers.

If you have an online identity I would argue, you should verify the online services with a USA number only, online services don’t allow “VoIP” numbers[1] but you can ask jmp.chat’s support to give you premium plus numbers that work pretty nicely.

for paying for a jmp.chat number you can use bitcoin - hence there is that privacy as well.

For voice calls, just use signal over the internet.

so the final question is how to get intenet in a mobile fashion.

The best is to use Cafe Wifi’s, different public wifi’s with a VPN - I recommend Obscurra, they decouple your IP from your traffic so they themselves don’t know what you browse, you can pay with lightning as well.

starlink is also nice with a router, here’s an article https://letters.empiresec.co/p/starlink

here are some global data only sim options - https://www.phonetravelwiz.com/phone-travel-options/sim-card-registration/

I am creating a crowd sourced Database of VoIP Providers per country code, please contribute - https://www.empiresec.co/voip/