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use a burner sim like: https://www.twilio.com/wireless/pricing. presumably twillio is harder to social engineer than [big telecom]



The Twilio SIM card is not as useful as you might expect. Unfortunately, Twilio cannot receive SMS messages from short codes [1], which are often used used by the kinds of places (banks etc) that rely on SMS for 2FA.

Also, keep in mind that an adversary can grab your text messages even without any social engineering skills; they just need to rent a cell tower somewhere in the world and advertise your number as roaming there [2]

As you implied, it is probably safer to use a different number than your main one for SMS-based 2FA (the much-maligned security through obscurity), but before you go out and buy a second phone plan, consider issues such as whether you will be able to receive SMS messages while traveling internationally.

[1] https://support.twilio.com/hc/en-us/articles/223181668-Can-T...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16773171


You could use https://jmp.chat/ instead - JMP does support short codes, and you can use is anywhere you have Internet access, regardless of whether you have a SIM or not.




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