Seven individuals were arrested in a coordinated law enforcement operation targeting a SIM farm and the sophisticated cybercrime-as-a-service (CaaS) platform it supported.
The suspects provided a SIM box service enabling miscreants worldwide to use phone numbers registered to other people to perform various types of cybercrime.
Essentially, the CaaS’s customers used the phone numbers to create fake social media accounts and hide their identities while engaging in illegal activities such as phishing, smishing, extortion, investment fraud, daughter-son scams, and fraudulent calls connected to fake shops and fake bank pages.
As part of the law enforcement operation, codenamed SIMCartel, five Latvian nationals were arrested in the country. Two other suspects were detained, and 1,200 SIM box devices and 40,000 active SIM cards were seized.
Investigators in Austria, Estonia, and Latvia performed a total of 26 searches and seized hundreds of thousands of additional SIM cards, along with five servers supporting infrastructure for the illegal services. The SIM cards rented as part of the operation had been bought from almost 80 countries.
Operation SIMCartel also targeted two websites the group used to promote its illegal services, namely gogetsms.com and apisim.com.
Additionally, the investigators seized four luxury vehicles and froze approximately $800,000 in the suspects’ bank and cryptocurrency accounts.
According to Europol, the CaaS enabled over 3,200 cyber fraud cases in Austria and Latvia, causing financial losses of roughly €5 million (approximately $5.8 million).
“The true scale of this network is still being uncovered. Measured by volume, more than 49 million online accounts were created on the basis of the illegal service provided by suspects. The damage caused by the renters of the telephone numbers to their victims amounts to several million euros,” Europol says.
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