- Europol’s Operation Simcartel dismantled a global SIM-box scam network across four countries
- Criminals used SIM-boxes to spoof calls, create fake accounts, and commit telecom fraud
- Over 49 million accounts linked to scams; losses exceeded €4.5 million in Austria alone
Law enforcement agencies from Austria, Estonia, Finland, and Latvia, together with Europol, have seized thousands of SIM-box devices and SIM cards used in multiple scam campaigns.
The police kicked off Operation Simcartel on October 10 in Latvia, carrying out 26 searches, and arresting five people right away, also seizing approximately 1,200 SIM-box devices, 40,000 SIM cards, and five servers with additional infrastructure.
A SIM-box device is a piece of hardware that holds multiple SIM cards and is used to route international phone calls over local mobile networks to avoid official carrier fees. Criminals (and some businesses) use it to make international calls appear as local ones, bypassing legitimate operators.
Highly sophisticated actors
“Hundreds of thousands” of SIM cards were also seized, Europol added, two websites defaced, and two more people arrested. The forces also seized hundreds of thousands in different currencies (USD and EUR), as well as four luxury vehicles.
“The criminal network and its infrastructure were technically highly sophisticated and enabled perpetrators around the world to use this SIM-box service to conduct a wide range of telecommunications-related cybercrimes, as well as other crimes,” Europol explained.
The criminal enterprise offered phone numbers registered to people from more than 80 countries, and allowed other criminals to set up fake accounts for social media and communication platforms.
Europol believes that more than 49 million online accounts were created using this criminal enterprise, and managed to attribute it to more than 1,700 fraud cases in Austria, and 1,500 in Latvia.
Total losses are counted in the millions, with financial loss just in Austria amounting to roughly €4.5 million. In Latvia, it was around €420,000.
The criminal network enabled a “multitude of serious crimes”, the report further states, including fraud on online second-hand marketplaces, daughter-son scams, investment fraud, fake shops and fake bank websites, and fake police officer scams.
Via BleepingComputer
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