European law enforcement dismantled and seized an expansive cybercrime operation used to facilitate phishing attacks via mobile networks for fraud, including account intrusions and the theft of credentials and financial data.
Investigators from Austria, Estonia and Latvia linked the networks to more than 3,200 fraud cases that included investment scams and fake emergencies for financial gain, authorities said. Reported financial losses totaled about $5.3 million in Austria and $490,000 in Latvia, officials said.
The operation, dubbed “SIMCARTEL,” resulted in seven arrests and the seizure of around 1,200 SIM box devices containing about 40,000 active SIM cards that were used to perpetrate crimes over telecom networks, Europol said. Europol described the infrastructure as highly sophisticated and said the online service it supported provided telephone numbers to people in more than 80 countries.
Authorities said they have traced the operation to more than 49 million accounts that were created and provided by the suspects. The services provided by the organisation were also allegedly used to commit extortion, migrant smuggling and a range of scams involving second-hand marketplaces, fake investments, shops and websites, officials said.
The coordinated law enforcement action largely took place on Oct. 10 in Latvia and spanned 26 searches, which produced hundreds of thousands of additional SIM cards, five servers and two websites, authorities said. Officials additionally seized four luxury vehicles and froze a combined $833,000 in suspects’ bank and cryptocurrency accounts.
The operation underlined the global prevalence of SIM farms, which allow criminals to sell services for scams and other illicit activity via mobile network infrastructure. The article noted a recent U.S. disruption and said security firm Unit 221B warned that SIM boxes and SIM farms are growing rapidly; Unit 221B said on LinkedIn that Ben Coon had identified at least 200 SIM boxes operating across dozens of U.S. locations.
Europol published a video of the Latvian police takedown at https://youtu.be/Z-ImysXws-0. Europol also cautioned that the full scale of the network remains under investigation.