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AFAIK, if the connection to the VPN server is properly set up, the ISP is not able to see any of the traffic.

Nevertheless, I just found a worrying comment to this blog post:

https://www.stealth-phones-guide.com/blog/anonymous-sim-card-scam

I Just wanted to double check with the experts of this website: is it true what the guy states in his comment?

That is, if I am routing all my traffic through a mobile hotspot with a prepaid sim card, using a VPN on both devices (say a laptop and the mobile phone acting as hotspot), will the ISP be able to see anything but a connection getting into the VPN?

The answer to this question would have been a sound NO, but this guy adding the details of a "carrier server" and a prepaid SIM made me doubtful, as he seems to know more than me.

Astarte
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  • Take a look at this recent answer that I wrote, maybe it will help shed some light: https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/231999/can-government-track-vpn-traffic-if-it-has-control-on-both-isp-and-website-serve/232005#232005 – Pedro May 22 '20 at 08:52

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The article you cite says does not contradict you in any way. But it might be that you have a wrong understanding of the anonymity a VPN provides. While a VPN makes it impossible for the ISP to know who you are communicating with finally (only sees the VPN endpoint) and cannot see the actual traffic the ISP still knows where the VPN traffic comes from, i.e. it can associate this encrypting traffic sent to the VPN endpoint with a specific SIM card.

If law enforcement agencies are able to get these information from the ISP and if they additionally are able to get information from the VPN provider they can correlate these and thus associate your SIM with a specific connection to a target server. This does not mean that LAE will get these information in the first place - but depending on your local laws, the ISP and the VPN provider this might be possible.

Steffen Ullrich
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The idea of that article is, that there are some people who use SIM cards sold them as "anonimous", where as actually there is essentially less anonymity. But to many people this is natural. If you are calling smb. or if you are using Internet, of course the local mobile providers register such calls and Internet connections. They know your phone number at any time. What they don't know right now is your name, birth date, etc. If police want to find a person by such anonymous SIM and if this person uses it time to time, this person will be found very soon.

To VPN: When your phone establishes a VPN connection, it retrieves certificate of the VPN server and validates it. If it is valid, the phone uses public key of VPN server to initialize encryption in the VPN session. It does not matter, via what networks the connection is established, because nobody can decrypt the traffic. The nodes between you and VPN server will of course know how much data at what time you sent or received. Based on this they can even know with high probability what kind of data is sent: text, images, audio, video. But they cannot decrypt the traffic.

mentallurg
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