Wdym wasting their time? They will search your home and confiscate all electronics, including the hardware running your TOR exit node and your phone, and your PC, and your notebook, and your gaming consoles, and of course any of such devices belonging to all other members of your household. And even if they cannot found anything that you have done wrong, you won’t get your stuff back for a long time (think half a year to multiple years).
Seems more like they would be wasting your time. And your money.
Ok, this I can answer personally as we did multiple cases of this happening (CSAM, bomb threats, etc) at work.
So, anonymity on the Internet is not actually a thing. Whether its an IP address or telecom switch or whatever, there is a path back to you even if only for either billing or connectivity purposes. So, for IP, we would receive a subpoena signed by a judge to hand over any and all information regarding the identify of the a given IP address (they include a long list of things whether applicable or not in the order so every potential base is covered). Once legal was able to review and handed it off to us, we take that and look at the DHCP logs to see that on a given date at a given time that the IP address was assigned as part of shelf A / slot B / port C. That shelf/slot/port combination is tied physically to an address/account. We provide the relevant logs and personal information of that user to law enforcement.
For bomb threats over the phone, telecom switches love to tell every other telecom switch who they are (again, connectivity purposes). So, when you make a call to a business/school doing that, their PBX is going to log to the millisecond when that call occurred and who the switch was. Again, subpoena and we pull the SIP logs. We can even provide the RTP/RTCP packets and reconstruct the phone call audio if the subpoena asks for that.
Korhaka@sopuli.xyz 2 hours ago
I can pay for internet in cash and the only details I gave them are fake and a random username. 4G internet isn’t even tied to the same location as I can move freely.
4G/5G cellular? So, in some ways you're actually easier to find. Your cell gateway is connecting to a tower which is logged and includes cell strength metrics. That gets compared to other towers and via trilateralization your location is determined.
Again, going back to what I previously said: there is a path back to you even if only for either billing or connectivity purposes.