Originally, I wrote this on reddit’s privacy subreddit, and got immediately blocked because I used a new, private account… go figure, right?

Here’s the body of the post:

I wrote advanced because most of the answers I found link to different paysites that are blocked by Facebook, Twitter, and of course Google. Some of the links I saw here link to an App on Google’s Play Store… the irony.

I’m looking for a way to get a phone number. So far, this is way harder to do anonymously than it should be for an individual.

Most places online reject gift cards you can buy with cash. Since you also need a phone, you’ll need to have it delivered somewhere, so that takes out online shopping unless you want to pay someone cash to get the package for you I guess.

In theory, you should be able to walk up to one of those cheap phone pay-as-you-go places (most owned by T-mobile these days I think) and pay for a phone and a pre-paid plan with cash. This is expensive (around $100 for the phone and the plan for starters) and they usually have instructions to collect a credit card # from you even if you won’t use it. You can try the gift card in here, I didn’t try that yet, but it seems like this would fail like the places online fail you (anyone has a different take?)

If there is a place online that would provide you a number for a monthly fee, and that number would work for these accounts, you need to pay for those. How do you do that anonymously?

You can create a Google account without a number, and maybe trick Facebook etc. into allowing you to create an account using that account. Eventually, this falls apart. Google asks for another verification eventually, Facebook scans for accounts that were created by minors (one of the ways to create an account without “adult” requirements like credit cards and phone numbers), and you might get locked out if you use a popular VPN server too fast.

So, how do you do that? Did you ever get a second, really private phone number? How?