The easier way to attack this is by instituting a know your customer law for phone systems including prepaid SIMs, combined with accomplice charges for anyone who's SIM is used in connection with criminal acts.
People are too free with their phones. Just walk into a bar and say you're too drunk to drive and could the bartender call my wife to pick me up? Not knowing its actually picking up $60M worth of coke instead of picking up me.
Or pull off to the side of the road, walk in well dressed, wave a dead iphone in front of them, ask the receptionist "hey my car broke down and my battery is dead, could you call this number and tell them my car broke down?" Or bonus points if the cops arrive because you're blocking traffic, ask the cop to call on their phone.
(edited I got the best idea that most anyone would fall for: Slip a kid $20 to ask an adult to call his mommie because he got lost...)
This is all well and good for communicating a single, pre-planned operation, but you're going to need to communicate a lot more in order to actually do all that pre-planning for it.
That doesn't really work in practice. All it does is raise the price of black market sims by a fixed, low dollar amount, that is irrelevant for criminal operations willing to spend thousands of dollars for secure coms.
Think about it: unless you distribute SIMs at the local police station, your last mile enforcement officer is just some guy in a kiosk making minimal wage. Assuming he is motivated by law to do his job right, and photocopy IDs etc., he's still untrained to spot fake ones, unwilling to make a ruckus if the customer face does not really match the ID etc.
All it takes is one rogue distributor or some homeless guy, and you will have thousands of SIMS that can't be traced. Then you have anonymous roaming sims for people willing to pay the data roaming fees.
Or pull off to the side of the road, walk in well dressed, wave a dead iphone in front of them, ask the receptionist "hey my car broke down and my battery is dead, could you call this number and tell them my car broke down?" Or bonus points if the cops arrive because you're blocking traffic, ask the cop to call on their phone.
(edited I got the best idea that most anyone would fall for: Slip a kid $20 to ask an adult to call his mommie because he got lost...)