Last week I bought a TIM SIM card to replace my VIVO, at least here in Bahia it seems to be better. I'm not lying if I'm saying that it took me literally HOURS. Actually it was so bad that I thought there was a problem with this particular SIM and bought a second one, but it didn't change anything, it also took me hours. Which brings me to the Why??
Well, you need to give your CPF and scan your ID, plus take a selfie, to activate a TIM line. Unfortunately, unlike VIVO, TIM doesn't accept the ID I got as a retirement visa holder (CRNM?), but fortunately they have an alternative procedure, where you have to answer a number of questions. One of these questions is: What is the UF of your CPF? After a bit of surfing, I found out that the UF is supposed to be the place where you got your CPF, which is Bahia in my case. But every time, once I was through with the questions, I got an error about erroneous data, and I was 100% sure about everything except this UF, so after a number of tries, I had to dig a little deeper. It turns out that on one of the numbers on my CRNM card, the last two digits correspond to my UF. There's a list that was extremely easy to find, so I'm not gonna post the link, but in my case the digits were/are 01, which is Mato de Grosso Sul (MS). And lo and behold, by using MS instead of BA, the activation went through like a charm, for both SIM cards. It takes about 2 hours until the number and data line gets activated, but you don't have to do anything else, other than maybe restarting the phone (or just put it in Airplane mode for a minute or two).
Does anybody have an explanation why my UF isn't Bahia? Is MS/01 the default for all foreigners? Or is it an error that I should fix by going to the Federal Police?
