How To Register Home Phone Service In A Pseudonym With Anonymous Payment

Thanks to internet telephony services that allow you to register a phone number with emergency services, it is now possible for the truly paranoid to have home telephone service set up in a fake name and with anonymous payment. But… do you want to?

Of course you do.

One day at a neighborhood garage sale…

I heard through the grapevine a few weeks ago that a military surplus store in town had gone out of business and that the owner was getting rid of remaining stock through a garage sale. Since digging through military surplus wares always sounds cool in theory (but rarely lives up to the hype), I headed over there.

While I did manage to snag some dirt cheap thermal undies, I was otherwise underwhelmed with the offerings. That is until I spotted a cardboard box under a table with wires sticking out of it. Being the nerd that I am, I took a look and found a box full to the brim of old school wireless telephone handsets and base stations.

I was digging through the loot, seeing what else was there, when I heard the owner call out to me:

Oh, just take the whole box for $5. They all work.

Sold.

Okay, so it was an impulse buy and I really had absolutely no use for the 17 wireless handsets, 12 charging stations, 5 base stations, 3 answering machines and, sing it with me now, a lonely corded deskphone. As I put the box of phones in my car and headed home I felt a pang of buyer’s remorse. Then I remembered something a friend had given me in the course of helping them move: an Ooma home internet phone device.

I had taken it off their hands and thought it might be fun to play with some day. I stuck it in a drawer and forgot about it. As soon as I got home with my new set of toys, I pulled it out and dug in.

Let me be clear: I had no specific objective in mind other than tinkering around with phones and I half expected the whole endeavor to fall apart for any number of reasons.

If nothing else, one can never have too many phone numbers, I rationalized to myself. Even if none of the handsets actually ended up working, maybe the Ooma device would give me a good phone number for setting up a couple socks.

Of course that assumes that the Ooma itself even works.

And right off the bat it seemed as though it wouldn’t.

Activating the Ooma

After plugging the Ooma into your home network, powering it on, and directing your browser to the configuration page, step one is entering the device’s activation code from the sticker on the bottom of the device.

Remember how I said I had been gifted the device by a friend? Well that friend had already activated it, although they didn’t end up using it.

Considering the current trend in device manufacturers looking for any excuse to irrevocably brick a device to force consumers to buy new ones, I assumed I was dead in the water already. Still, I called their tech support. The agent I spoke to was friendly and courteous and said it was actually no big deal and they would create a ticket to reactivate it. She asked for my name and email address and, although I hadn’t planned it, I found myself giving a pseudonym and email address that I use specifically for disinformation purposes regarding my home address.

A few days went by and I never heard back from tech support. I assumed this was going to turn into a whole big thing and I was starting to plan out my arguments. Then I figured I’d try just one more time to do the activation.

It worked!

Choosing a phone number, registering a payment method

Prompted to enter a name and address, I just used the pseudonym and email I had already used with tech support. Then I used my real home address as this phone number would be connected with emergency services, which is really the main reason to keep using a home phone service these days.

Then I came upon another speed bump: choosing a phone number. I have had too many experiences of registering a phone number for both real phones, burner phones, and softphones, only to have calls daily coming from bill collectors, spammers, and just random mystery callers. If this number was going to stick with me for a while, I wanted to do as much as I could to avoid that silliness.

I don’t know if this is the best strategy for choosing phone numbers that are all recycled and thrown into a random pool (probably all from Twilio), but this was my approach:

1. Avoid numbers that seem easy to remember or attractive in any way
2. Google the numbers
3. There are always going to be pages of results. Don’t use any numbers with more than 3 pages of google results.
4. Look through those pages of search results, scanning the preview Google shows for each. If the page preview just shows the phone number among other phone numbers (usually shown in a sequence), don’t worry about it. If, however, it shows the number with a name next to it, the number is disqualified and start over with step 1.

Don’t rush the step of choosing a phone number, because it can save a lot of headaches later.

Now with Ooma, you do have to pay a minimal monthly payment for the phone service. It amounts to taxes and emergency services fees. For me it was around $5 a month. I didn’t think there was any way that a pre-paid credit card would be accepted, but it was.

Interestingly, at the end of the whole registration process, Ooma had me selected a second phone number. I’m not sure exactly how I can elect to dial to/from this phone number specifically, but it is compelling and I’ll be looking further into it.

Now what?

The rest of the process was easy as pie. All I had to do was hook up one of my new (well, new to me) wireless handset base stations, and it worked great right off the bat.

Ooma has a bunch of bells and whistles that are beyond the scope of this article, but the only drawback to the service that I have seen is that it does not seem to allow SMS texting. One cool feature is you can actually use the Ooma app on your smart phone to dial out, and the calls will show as originating from your home phone number. This raises all sorts of interesting possibilities like calling from a wifi-only iPod Touch and other tablet devices. This feature is supposed to be the primary benefit of MySudo, however I’ve never been able to actually make it work.

I don’t really know how Ooma compares to other services like, say, MagicJack. This isn’t really a product review, although if you did want to help support my increasingly absurd opsec experiments and you were thinking of buying an Ooma, buying one through my referral link will get me $20 in credit to use on fancier equipment from them.

Okay… But Why? (AKA Use Cases)

To be honest I struggle this question. I could definitely see benefits of doing this for people that need extreme privacy (people hiding from abusive ex’s, stalkers, traffickers, newsmedia, etc.) and also have young children at home, since kids probably shouldn’t have cell phones until much older than is standard practice, but they still should know how to call 9–1–1 if need be.

In general, it is a good practice to be as private as possible, until it sacrifices health and safety. Home phone service is one of those things where the sacrifice is probably worth it. Ooma, and possibly other internet telephony services as well, might come close to letting us have our cake and eat it too.

As time goes by, I will know more. The main thing that will be interesting to watch is if Ooma gives up your information to any marketing databases. I have a suspicion that they, eventually will. They don’t really make any money out of it, aside from the initial purchase of the device, unless you spring for their premium services.

When and if that happens, I will definitely let you know.