A recent Secret Service raid uncovers an insane network of SIM cards—along with the oddest piece of hardware I’ve ever seen. Here’s the deal with the SIM bank.
I strongly believe a lot of the reporting is hyperbole.
If you’re going to run an offshore call center for spam, and domestic carriers are locking you out, this is how you’d get around it.
Those texts you get “Hey remember that movie on Thursday?” to bait you into a convo?
Those calls from the IRS telling you to send $2500 in Walmart gift cards?
Those can all come from these en mass.
And the best spot to put them is in ultra dense areas where millions of people live to fly under the radar.
They can have thousands and thousands of SIMs, rotate IMEIs, those can as far as I’m aware bridge physical devices from anywhere and make them appear as though they’re here.
Think fake reviews, fake social media, social media bots, scam call center operations, etc.
Could they overload a region? Sure, just like a football game, or major event when everyone calls at once.
I was going to bring up the Interpol bust all around Africa of SIM farms that is referenced in this article. Usually all about international calling and for scammers to use.
Reporting on this said that this setup had been involved with nation-state level threats. I wonder if it’s that these spammers were just doing their spam stuff and have all their stuff automated to sell bandwidth. Like you just send them a CSV with numbers and messages, and they don’t care what the content is. So then nation-state just books a few campaigns that are what kick off an FBI/Secret Service investigation because the nation-state isn’t actually affiliated with the spammers.
This setup is worth a ton of money just chugging along, and realistically, this is not built to overwhelm a few key mobile towers. These things are built to spam and scam.
I strongly believe a lot of the reporting is hyperbole.
If you’re going to run an offshore call center for spam, and domestic carriers are locking you out, this is how you’d get around it.
Those texts you get “Hey remember that movie on Thursday?” to bait you into a convo?
Those calls from the IRS telling you to send $2500 in Walmart gift cards?
Those can all come from these en mass.
And the best spot to put them is in ultra dense areas where millions of people live to fly under the radar.
They can have thousands and thousands of SIMs, rotate IMEIs, those can as far as I’m aware bridge physical devices from anywhere and make them appear as though they’re here.
Think fake reviews, fake social media, social media bots, scam call center operations, etc.
Could they overload a region? Sure, just like a football game, or major event when everyone calls at once.
That’s not why you’d have all those sims though.
I was going to bring up the Interpol bust all around Africa of SIM farms that is referenced in this article. Usually all about international calling and for scammers to use.
Reporting on this said that this setup had been involved with nation-state level threats. I wonder if it’s that these spammers were just doing their spam stuff and have all their stuff automated to sell bandwidth. Like you just send them a CSV with numbers and messages, and they don’t care what the content is. So then nation-state just books a few campaigns that are what kick off an FBI/Secret Service investigation because the nation-state isn’t actually affiliated with the spammers.
This setup is worth a ton of money just chugging along, and realistically, this is not built to overwhelm a few key mobile towers. These things are built to spam and scam.