I have had the same number for close to 10 years now. Been using it for everything. All sorts of crap. After the big Facebook leak in 2021, I’ve started getting flooded with robo-calls, which is something I’ve never had to deal with before, since it’s not a US number, but a small European one. I also signed up for some Crypto site, long ago, and my number has seemingly been sold over a couple of times, since I’m also getting those “You have an account with us with 9000 dollars worth of Bitcoin” scam calls.

I’ve been meaning to get myself an actual good number for a while, so I purchased one with a lot of repeating digits, which I’ve slowly been transitioning to for family and friends. I keep both numbers though, as I have so many accounts tied to the old one, that it’s very hard to keep track of. Sometimes I still encounter a site, which I used years ago, that asks me to verify the login via my phone.

And that’s why I still have it. Whenever a site asks to verify via phone, I will give the old number, which I already know has been breached multiple times. By doing this, I will keep my new number clean, and never give it out to an online service.

I’m just tired of the endless robo-calls, and as I’ll only need to be able to receive texts, I figured I might as well completely disable inbound calls.