French operator Free sells prepaid SIM cards through vending machines in many places. No ID check, totally automated, machine spits out a SIM of your chosen type along with a receipt with necessary info.
I wouldn't describe the Free SIM cards as prepaid, they are a pay monthly subscription.
You can also order them online for delivery to a specified address, they don't seem to check whether it is your home address but mine is paid using a French bank account which may help.
You can actually choose between having a normal subscription (where they charge your card monthly) and paying for a certain number of months (1 or 2 iirc). If you choose the latter you have to make a new payment manually (where - again - you choose how many months you wish to pay for), otherwise your number will be automatically terminated. I'd say it's fair to call that prepaid.
You can get prepaids without any ID card in Finland, at least. Sweden as well, the last time I bought.
Regular subscriptions not, that's relevant for invoicing (as you can buy things through these subscriptions, it is pretty much like getting a credit card, hence asking for photo ID is entirely reasonable.)
I bought a Lyca mobile SIM in Germany last year, no photo ID. I got a Meteor SIM here in Ireland, also no ID required.
My current operator is Virgin, and that didn't require ID etiher, although since I already had a home internet account with them, that may have been why (no idea if new customers need ID). I did not need ID to setup the original home broadband account though. They obviously have my address and billing details, but they never had any proof that I'm who I saw I am. My previous phone provider was Three Ireland and they didn't require any ID either.
All of these except my Virgin SIM are/were prepaid. It seems that prepaids don't always require ID (and having postpaid/bill phones require ID does make sense).
This seems incorrect. I've traveled around in EU and haven't seen a single ID check for SIMs yet. Where is this happening? In my home country of Estonia we even have SIMs being given away for free on the streets as advertisement.
Germany (O2) had an obnoxious check. The dude bitched at me because I had a copy of my passport "saved in the cloud" (it was in 1Password local on my phone; given that the US, RU, CN, JP, UA, MY etc governments all have copies of my passport already, it's a whole lot less sensitive than anything else I have in a local-only encrypted database on my phone. It took about 30m to go through the process.
