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.
This looks like the gear normally used by gangs that do text spam scams, what makes this exactly out of the range for a run of the mill criminal syndicate? Unless they have some other information that they’re not sharing?
I mean, you could probably use them that way, but there’s no indication that they were planning on doing that. One of those devices is only ~$3000, so if you want to spam all of New York and the upside is a bunch of people sending you their life savings it’s not exactly an investment that’s out of reach for your average crime syndicate.
State actors would probably hack into the Telco systems themselves instead, which you can do without needing to be on the ground. Or they’d keep their DDoS device in their embassy and do it from there.
Or they’d keep their DDoS device in their embassy and do it from there.
If such activities are in any way traceable, it might be prudent to preserve deniability by siting them somewhere other than the embassy.
But having said that, this looks much more like an SMS bot farm, designed for smam’nscam purposes, that caught the Secret Service’s attention because it was being used by someone to obfuscate the origin of threats.
If the treasonous idiots in the Trump administration hadn’t fired most of the governments cyber-security experts, we might have seen a less hyperbolic, hysterical analysis than what the Secret Squirrel Service has published.
But as things stand, it’s a bad idea to believe anything the government says, since it is being run by people who are neither competent nor truthful.
the linked article did mention apartments were “abandoned”, so maybe it is actual organized crime local to NYC. Whoever it was would have to be pretty entrenched to know where is safe to set up.
If it were just run of the mill spam/scam stuff, why not just use VoIP or contract out like the rest of them do? It would certainly be cheaper if that were the goal. There are many, many different reasons to want so many local numbers that are beyond the obvious. Personally, I have questions.
Call recipient can tell when incoming number terminates at a data center (most VOIP). They like cellular network numbers for the same reason they like residential IP addresses.
So does the comment about facilitating communication among miscreants: that’s just the Feds’ hard-on to outlaw encrypted messaging rearing its ugly head again.
More info: https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/09/us-uncovers-100000-sim-cards-that-could-have-shut-down-nyc-cell-network/
This looks like the gear normally used by gangs that do text spam scams, what makes this exactly out of the range for a run of the mill criminal syndicate? Unless they have some other information that they’re not sharing?
Yeah the part about overwhelming emergency services just seems like fearmongering to me.
I mean, you could probably use them that way, but there’s no indication that they were planning on doing that. One of those devices is only ~$3000, so if you want to spam all of New York and the upside is a bunch of people sending you their life savings it’s not exactly an investment that’s out of reach for your average crime syndicate.
State actors would probably hack into the Telco systems themselves instead, which you can do without needing to be on the ground. Or they’d keep their DDoS device in their embassy and do it from there.
If such activities are in any way traceable, it might be prudent to preserve deniability by siting them somewhere other than the embassy.
But having said that, this looks much more like an SMS bot farm, designed for smam’nscam purposes, that caught the Secret Service’s attention because it was being used by someone to obfuscate the origin of threats.
If the treasonous idiots in the Trump administration hadn’t fired most of the governments cyber-security experts, we might have seen a less hyperbolic, hysterical analysis than what the Secret Squirrel Service has published.
But as things stand, it’s a bad idea to believe anything the government says, since it is being run by people who are neither competent nor truthful.
the linked article did mention apartments were “abandoned”, so maybe it is actual organized crime local to NYC. Whoever it was would have to be pretty entrenched to know where is safe to set up.
If it were just run of the mill spam/scam stuff, why not just use VoIP or contract out like the rest of them do? It would certainly be cheaper if that were the goal. There are many, many different reasons to want so many local numbers that are beyond the obvious. Personally, I have questions.
Call recipient can tell when incoming number terminates at a data center (most VOIP). They like cellular network numbers for the same reason they like residential IP addresses.
So does the comment about facilitating communication among miscreants: that’s just the Feds’ hard-on to outlaw encrypted messaging rearing its ugly head again.