SIM Farm Dismantled in Europe, Seven Arrested

Seven individuals were arrested in a coordinated operation against a SIM farm and the sophisticated cybercrime-as-a-service platform it supported. The suspects ran a CaaS that allowed illegitimate users to rent phone numbers and create fake social media accounts to conduct phishing, smishing, extortion, and other fraud schemes, with losses totalling about €5 million (~$5.8 million).

As part of the SIMCartel operation, five Latvian nationals were arrested in Latvia, with two other suspects detained, and authorities seized 1,200 SIM box devices and 40,000 active SIM cards. Investigators across Austria, Estonia and Latvia conducted 26 searches, seizing hundreds of thousands of additional SIM cards plus five servers, and the SIM cards had been bought from almost 80 countries; two promoted websites, gogetsms[.]com and apisim[.]com, were targeted.

Four luxury vehicles were seized and approximately $800,000 frozen in bank and cryptocurrency accounts. Europol says the CaaS enabled over 3,200 cyber fraud cases in Austria and Latvia, with damage amounting to several million euros. According to Europol, more than 49 million online accounts were created on the basis of the illegal service.