I have been hearing versions of this story with disturbing frequency lately, from a doctor, a software engineer, an artist, a journalist and others, men and women ranging from their early twenties to their mid-forties.
Some are politically active, others barely so. What many appear to have in common is that at some point they said something online that somebody in authority did not like.
One woman in her thirties described discovering that the mobile line registered in her name had been blocked. When she tried to buy another SIM card, she learned that her national ID had also been restricted, preventing her from simply starting again with a new number.
It sounds like an inconvenience until you begin listing everything in Iran that now requires a phone number registered in your own name. Government portals routinely require text-message verification. So do university and banking services, even ride-hailing and food-delivery apps.
This is what makes the punishment so effective. The mobile phone is one of the keys to modern life here, and someone can apparently take that key away without ever coming to your door.
Life in Iran is difficult enough without inventing new ways to make it harder. People are still recovering from a brutal crackdown and war while living with the possibility of another round. Prices rise between visits to the supermarket, rent eats into salaries that were inadequate to begin with, power cuts are frequent and the internet remains unreliable.
Most people spend an extraordinary amount of mental energy simply working out how to get through another month. Now imagine trying to do all that without a functioning phone number.
A journalist in her late twenties told me she was preparing a report on SIM blocking when her own number suddenly stopped working. She knew immediately that it was not a technical glitch or an administrative accident.
"It feels as though I've ceased to exist administratively in my own country," she told me.
Others disappear even more quietly. They are not prominent activists whose names people will recognise. They are doctors, programmers, students and artists, or simply people with a few hundred followers who wrote something angry or shared something at the wrong moment.
Their phone goes dead and perhaps a handful of friends know. There is no campaign for them, and often nobody beyond their immediate circle even knows that they have been punished.
One software engineer told me that after his SIM was blocked, he began looking online for people in the same position. In about a week, he says, he came across almost 100 accounts that appeared similar to his own.
There is something particularly cruel about a punishment with no clear beginning or end. If you are charged with an offence, at least there is an accusation to confront. Here, most people are not told about the red line they crossed or how long they should suffer for it.
One person I spoke to had their SIM blocked for months after intervention by Revolutionary Guards intelligence. To have it restored, they say, they were required to delete their Twitter account and promise not to get themselves into further trouble online.
Many watching Iran from afar look at the social changes visible on Tehran's streets and conclude that the state has loosened its grip. Women now walk around without hijab in numbers that would have been difficult to imagine only a few years ago. Young men and women mix openly, and the cafés are full of people who can afford them.
None of this happened because the authorities graciously granted people more freedom of course. They fought these changes and continue to fight them, but society pushed ahead anyway and, on some fronts at least, the state appears for now to have lost.
But political dissent is a different story. There seems to be far less willingness to retreat when people challenge power itself, and the methods do not always have to be spectacular.
Repression can be something as mundane as discovering that the little device in your hand, around which so much of your life has been organised, no longer connects you to anything.
This is the latest version of the Islamic Republic: punishment hidden in plain sight, no dramatic image for the outside world to share, no prison gate for relatives to gather outside and often no official decision that can be challenged.
You can see a young woman walking down a Tehran street with her hair uncovered. What you cannot see is whether her phone still works.
