> I bought a T-Mobile SIM card with cash and activated it at home and I could have put anything into the address information. I have never once shown my ID when dealing with my T-Mobile account. Try doing that in China.

That's not hard to do in China (well, your SIM card would be China Mobile or China Unicom, not T-Mobile), unless they've made some drastic changes in the last couple of years. But since I've seen the claim that you had to provide ID to buy a SIM card made at times where I knew it was currently false, I strongly suspect it's still false.