I never thought about it until I recently realized that a phone number is literally the key to everything. Banks, government services, social networks, messengers, delivery services. Literally everything. That’s actually dangerous. If someone steals my number, my whole life is open to them.

I stopped leaving my phone number anywhere a long time ago. Many people don’t even think that when we enter a phone number to get a code or register in systems that require a phone number, this is also sharing personal data. So the fact that you at least started thinking about it is already a huge step forward.

This is about the idea that many people think they are not interesting to scammers at all, and all this online safety talk is just empty words. If that was really true, only very rich and powerful people would suffer, but for some reason we see the opposite picture. The easiest way is to use a temporary number. If I need to receive sms fast to register somewhere, if I need to call a client for work without giving them my personal number, log into some resource, I use an inexpensive virtual number, which takes zero time and effort.