A very boring guide to how to register your Mexican cell phone

If you’ve been living in Mexico this past year, and you have a Mexican cell phone number, you’ve got a job to do.

Chances are, you already know what this job is. At least in my own case, Telcel has been sending me weekly reminder messages about registering my cell phone. If I don’t do it by June 30, it warns, my service will cease!

Even so, I’ve been putting it off: just one more thing in the long list of things that have to get done. Taxes, getting my car verificado and filling out all the forms for my kid’s school trip — the list is truly never-ending these days.

But yesterday, I finally did it! It wasn’t the smoothest trámite I’ve gone through in Mexico, but luckily it wasn’t the hardest, either. More on that below.

The reason for the cell phone registry

First, let’s talk about why we need to do it in the first place. Last July, the Mexican government passed the General Law of the National Public Security System. The purpose of the law is to reduce phone-related crime, of which there is quite a bit.

This mostly comes in the form of extortion. Mexico is working hard to cut down on this crime, which, as I’ve written before, has been especially hard to eradicate. It’s practically baked in. Much of this extortion comes in the form of phone calls and text messages. And believe it or not, many of those actually happen from prisons.

So one of Mexico’s solutions to try to stop this is to eliminate the possibility of getting phone numbers that aren’t actually tied to an identity. Amazingly, getting those numbers has been super duper easy, all this time.

When I first got my cell phone here in 2004, for example, I simply went to the Telcel store to buy a chip — essentially a phone number — and stuck it in my phone. Voilá! The only way you’d know it was me calling is if I were saved in your phone, and there really wasn’t much of a way to legally tie my name or identity to it.

Besides, in those days, I was extra poor and wouldn’t have dreamed of having an actual phone plan (for which you did need to give all kinds of information). I’d simply go to any tiendita, ask for credit, and — again — voilá, credit on my phone. Simple.

Extortion by phone

Apparently, though, the ease of getting and immediately habilitating any old number has its downsides. And the main one is getting harassed by random strangers demanding money. From prison, or maybe in front of a call center.

Their methods are practiced and specific, and also, I mean, it’s a numbers game. Sooner or later, someone on the other end of the line is going to believe that their child has indeed been kidnapped, which ultimately translates to payday for the caller, or more likely, for the caller’s boss.

In short, this new law is meant to prevent all of that. No more random numbers or calling people to say, “Pay up or your dog is toast.” If this law works the way it’s supposed to, that won’t be possible anymore. You report the threats, and security officials can follow the line to its owner. If you’re going to be a phone criminal now, you can’t be an anonymous one.

All that said, this law is not without its detractors. I’ve seen plenty of videos, for example, of distrustful people alarmed about the government having their “biometric data.” What about our privacy? What are they going to do to protect it?

To this, I give a resounding “meh.” Anyone who still has illusions of privacy in this day and age is kidding themself as far as I’m concerned. Believe me, we are known. We are findable. The thing that makes it not too scary for most of us is that we don’t have much to offer. Humans: mostly not individually interesting enough to be singled out.

Yes, foreigners have to do it, too — if it’s a Mexican cell phone

I mean, just the amount of information you give away when you download an app is enough to know more about you than even a police report might have had 30 years ago. The time to throw a fit about privacy was back then. Right now, we’ve got bigger fish to fry, my friends.

Anyway! Here we are with our deadline: Register your Mexican phone number before June 30, or lose service.

First, a caveat, as I’ve seen a lot of confused people out there — especially since they say, “And foreigners have to do it, too!”

What they mean is that foreigners have to do it if they have a Mexican number. If you’ve retained your service from your own country and don’t have a Mexican number, then this excludes you. And anyway, you’re presumably “registered” — your number is tied to your identity — in your own country.

Here was the process for me:

Step 1

I went to the Telcel store with my documents: passport, my CURP and my immigration card. They say that foreigners only need their passport, but I was right to take my own advice about trámites in Mexico because they checked everything.

The friendly customer service guy stared at my documents, asked the person sitting next to him about them, frowned at his computer and then stared at the documents some more.

Why? Because, of course, everything was not in order. Unbeknownst to me, my RFC (not sure why they needed to confirm it, but they did) did not match my CURP. We discovered why: if you don’t have a second last name, some government bureaucrats type an “X” in the field, and others an “N” for “null.” Those then get worked into your CURP! And my CURP has actually changed since I first came, because in my first passport, they separated the “De” from the “Vries,” and then I had to have it corrected, and then corrected on all my Mexican stuff.

The RFC is basically a shorter version of your CURP with some different characters at the end, and … you know what, you’re just going to want to leave yourself some extra time to sort it out. Don’t wait until June 29, okay? That’s cutting it too close.

Step 2

Then the guy took my “biometric data” by taking my picture through a special program. I had to put my head up and to the side a few different times … in the future, there will be no confusion over who that saggy neck belongs to.

He told me he’d need to get word from those “above him” since there was confusion regarding my various ID numbers, even though he personally could verify my identity. (The program they use to verify identity and register your number is linear: it won’t let you go to the next step if there’s any kind of error on the previous one.) After saying it might be a few days and he’d call me, it magically came through — I was registered! Hooray!

Step 3

I then registered my child’s number, as children cannot register themselves — FYI, you can register up to 10 lines in your name. And that was it! The Mexican government now has the same data it already had, plus my phone number tied to it.

My career as a phone extortionist has ended before it even began.

Sarah DeVries is a writer and translator based in Xalapa, Veracruz. She can be reached through her website, sarahedevries.substack.com.