You could solve this by simply sending out a memo not to respond to such offers or risk termination.
If your phone number being stolen causes your savings to get drained for long enough that you run into problems making important payments like rent, taxes, car payments; That can pretty quickly spiral into even worse situations. In a world/country where many people have too few savings to go even a month without being paid, losing even that can get extremely dangerous. Not to mention the stress of such a situation alone will probably take quite a bit of your life expectancy off.
At least in the United States, we also live in a society where the financial ramifications of getting shot could lead to equally bad financial outcomes (whether directly or indirectly).
Until it is.
> It’s no better than selling a gun to a person you know intends to use it to commit a crime.
Though I guess you could be making the case that crime is a legitimate use of guns?
To be clear, my original post only pointed out that what you said is a non sequitur:
> It’s no better than selling a gun to a person you know intends to use it to commit a crime.
> > Just so we’re clear: getting shot is quite a bit worse than having your phone number stolen.
You can make $15/hr as an entry-level cashier - your first job, zero job history - at CVS and Walgreens, with tolerable health/dental/eye insurance.
And if you're not entirely braindead you can trivially become a pharmacy intern (then tech) and start at $18-$20, with benefits. They'll pay for your licensing. You can make $18-$22 to start as a telemetry or video tech, with zero experience. Hospitals are filled with people sitting in rooms watching video monitors making sure patients don't fall over or hurt themselves, it pays 3x the minimum wage and requires zero experience.
If you're making $7.50 /hr at this point, you're either living somewhere very barren (almost zero economic opportunities), or it's your own fault.
Almost nobody makes federal minimum wage.
It's gotta be at 2%+ making state minimum wage though.
CA for example has a minimum wage somewhere north of $15, and like 10% of the population makes minimum wage or less. That right there pulls the number for the whole country up to at least 1% making minimum wage, because CA is >10% of the population. (Extreme example, since CA also has the highest real poverty rate in the US (SPM, not the hilariously undercounting OPM)).
Even so, retail sales jobs are often heavily commission adjusted which makes this not so cut and dry.
Sell sell sell, or you are well below the poverty line and quickly replaced by someone more willing to cut corners on the activities that are not profitable like carefully checking ID.
I don't think I have much sympathy if you lose your job for doing something this damaging and probably illegal.
Honestly what the OP suggested is simply a sting operation.
Your reaction to it is ... more scary.
SIM swapping? No comment. Trying to catch SIM swappers? Suddenly you have feelings about it!