......or How Efficiently the NSA is tracking you.
The wife and I are vacationing in Cambodia right now. I checked with Verizon, and while my phone would work here, it's more money then I care to spend. So when I got here I bought a Cambodian SIM (they sell them at the airport and all over for tourists). $10 got me some minutes, some texts and 3.5 Gb of data for a month. I shut my phone down, slammed the Asian SIM in, booted up, signed in and bada boom. I can make phone calls (to Cambodian phones) they can call me (on my new Cambodian 10 digit number), texts, data everything is great.
Here's where it gets weird. I'm getting SMS messages from the states. From my friends. If they text my Stateside Verizon number, in about 30 secs (I timed it) the message will get to my phone, with my Cambodian SIM in. The message will come from an Asian number, but my phone will know (somehow) who it's from, pull the right name from my contacts, and assign them to the Asian number. My Verizon SIM is in my camera case for all of this and wifi is turned off. It's coming over the Cambodian Cell network.
How the heck?