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Unfortunately, I don't think this is always true for physical SIMs.

I recently bought a temporary SIM in the US during my holidays (StraightTalk) and was surprised that you can only use the physical SIM after you register online with you IMEI. I haven't checked, but I imagine that after that the card would only work with that IMEI.

Fortunately, I don't think this is a practice in Europe.

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To be fair, though, Straight Talk is absolutely hot garbage. I had a fiasco trying to activate two physical SIMs and port numbers to them back in January. Their provisioning system chokes and dies on phones with both eSIM and physical SIM capability (like the factory-unlocked iPhone SE 3rd gen models I was trying to activate). I spent hours on the phone holding and talking to reps, getting disconnected and calling back to start all over again. It was a nightmare.

I'm quite happy to read this, because my experience was also awful - they didn't accept the IMEI of 3 phones I tried and their app is full of ads (not to mention that I kept receiving scam calls).

I really hope that it's because they are awful and this is not the typical American mobile phone experience.

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