The ‘Your SIM card has a name’ Facebook trick

You may have recently seen on Facebook a lot of people posting a ‘trick’ that they have discovered/seen whereby posting a short snippet of code reveals the ‘name’ of your cell phone or SIM card based on the last three digits of your phone number. Whilst this does produce a name it is totally unrelated to your mobile number.

Here is the trick that you would have seen and probably tried since you are here reading about it.

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Every SIM CARD has a name. Try this:

1st step : from your mobile number number, take the last 3 numbers. Example-07800 969684, take "684"only

2nd step: Write this @*[684:0] in the comment box below, replacing the 3 numbers with your own.

3rd step: remove the * sign and press enter in the comment box

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Due to the way telephone numbers are generated, more than one person can have the same last 3 digits. Therefore claiming your unique phone number has it’s own name is nonsense.

So how is this happening? Basically the number you provide corresponds to an actual user’s ID on Facebook. It is not limited to three characters either. The code you enter into the comment box is a Facebook short-hand code that converts an ID number into it’s corresponding name. If you were to enter the code @[4:0] then this will present back ‘Mark Zuckerberg’ since he was the first ID to use the website (1-3 were used for testing I believe). By using just three digits you are picking a random Harvard student who were the first users of the social networking site. You can even check this by going to the following URL and replacing 123 with the number that you are using.

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=123

Although the code works and is perhaps fun to use it is in no way related to a cell phone, mobile phone, SIM card or anything similar. It isn’t dangerous either (virus or spyware) so use it to your heart’s content.