"Is it safer?" is a fair question to ask about anything that replaces a piece of plastic you could hold in your hand with something you can't. The honest answer, for eSIM, is: safer in some specific ways, unchanged in others, and not a substitute for basic caution in any way. Here's the actual breakdown, myth by myth.
This matters more when you're travelling than at home. You're carrying your phone through more unfamiliar places, connecting to more unfamiliar Wi-Fi, and generally paying closer attention to your bank balance while you're away from it - exactly the conditions a scammer looks for. Knowing which risks actually changed with eSIM, and which didn't, is worth five minutes before you fly rather than a bad afternoon abroad.
Myth: eSIMs can be swapped just as easily as physical SIMs
This is the one worth clearing up first, because it runs backwards from the truth. A classic "SIM swap" scam relies on a fraudster convincing your carrier to move your number onto a physical SIM they control - a social-engineering attack on a phone shop or call centre, not a technical one on the SIM itself. An eSIM profile isn't something that can be handed across a counter or slotted into another phone by a stranger with a good story; moving it requires account-level authentication that a plastic SIM was never built to enforce in the first place. It's not that eSIM makes swapping impossible - it's that it removes the physical hand-off most swap scams actually depend on.
Myth: there's nothing to steal, so there's nothing to worry about
Closer to true, but not quite. There's no physical chip to pickpocket, which does remove one entire category of risk - nobody is fishing a tray out of your phone on a crowded platform. But your eSIM profile still lives on a phone that can be lost, stolen, or left in a taxi, and a phone with no lock screen protects nothing at all, plastic SIM or otherwise. The SIM being embedded doesn't secure the device around it.