You may or may not have stumbled across my comment on a post from a few days ago, mentioning how I fake banned my account on WhatsApp (attached below) when in reality I just deleted it.
Well, it worked like a charm. I got my close friends and my significant other to switch to Signal, I told them we have no choice since I got banned and won’t get my account back, and told them that Signal was developed by the same people who once worked at WhatsApp before Facebook bought them. And it worked.
Just for your information, I am a zoomer in the US, the group which is probably the hardest to do this with, yet I did it (although granted we all used Whatsapp before which is also not very common in the US especially among zoomers who love Snapchat and Instagram DMs)
Meanwhile I just ignore sms messages for a week, then respond, then ignore again with an occasional reminder I don’t use sms and signal or something else is better to reach me with. Only a couple people left to convince… The most stubborn of the bunch.
But yeah as others said, lying like that ain’t going to be good down the road, especially when they’re close people to you. Hope this doesn’t come back to bite you.