this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2025
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79
NYC Telecom Raid: What's Up with Those Weird SIM Banks? (tedium.co)
submitted 6 days ago by floofloof@lemmy.ca to c/technology@lemmy.world
16 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.bestiver.se/post/636119

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[–] aramova@infosec.pub 39 points 6 days ago (1 children)

I strongly believe a lot of the reporting is hyperbole.

If you're going to run an offshore call center for spam, and domestic carriers are locking you out, this is how you'd get around it.

Those texts you get "Hey remember that movie on Thursday?" to bait you into a convo?

Those calls from the IRS telling you to send $2500 in Walmart gift cards?

Those can all come from these en mass.

And the best spot to put them is in ultra dense areas where millions of people live to fly under the radar.

They can have thousands and thousands of SIMs, rotate IMEIs, those can as far as I'm aware bridge physical devices from anywhere and make them appear as though they're here.

Think fake reviews, fake social media, social media bots, scam call center operations, etc.

Could they overload a region? Sure, just like a football game, or major event when everyone calls at once.

That's not why you'd have all those sims though.

[–] GreenShimada@lemmy.world 8 points 6 days ago

I was going to bring up the Interpol bust all around Africa of SIM farms that is referenced in this article. Usually all about international calling and for scammers to use.

Reporting on this said that this setup had been involved with nation-state level threats. I wonder if it's that these spammers were just doing their spam stuff and have all their stuff automated to sell bandwidth. Like you just send them a CSV with numbers and messages, and they don't care what the content is. So then nation-state just books a few campaigns that are what kick off an FBI/Secret Service investigation because the nation-state isn't actually affiliated with the spammers.

This setup is worth a ton of money just chugging along, and realistically, this is not built to overwhelm a few key mobile towers. These things are built to spam and scam.

[–] solrize@lemmy.ml 24 points 6 days ago

Yeah those things have been around a while. Web scrapers and sneaker bot operators are fond of them. Sometimes they run racks full of real phones so they can put downloaded phone apps on them for nefarious purposes, instead of having to try to fool the apps with virtualization.

The thing about shutting down the cell network sounds like alarmism unless there was something unusual that they weren't saying.

[–] A_norny_mousse@feddit.org 11 points 6 days ago (1 children)

SPAM MACHINE

sm1

Yes, these are all SIM cards.

More images from the article: all the SIMs, same machine at half capacity.

[–] MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 3 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Why does this exist? The manufacturers are not criminals? Are there legal usecases?

[–] A_norny_mousse@feddit.org 4 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

According to the article, even AliBaba thinks this is somewhat fishy - but still sells it.

I'm not sure about the legality. To me this feels like the difference between having one fuel canister in your garage, or 100.

[–] Xanthobilly@lemmy.world 11 points 6 days ago (1 children)

More info: https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/09/us-uncovers-100000-sim-cards-that-could-have-shut-down-nyc-cell-network/

[–] jonne@infosec.pub 14 points 6 days ago (1 children)

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?

[–] frongt@lemmy.zip 14 points 6 days ago (2 children)

Yeah the part about overwhelming emergency services just seems like fearmongering to me.

[–] jonne@infosec.pub 9 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] some_kind_of_guy@lemmy.world 6 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] solrize@lemmy.ml 2 points 6 days ago

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.

[–] phutatorius@lemmy.zip 2 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

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.

[–] phutatorius@lemmy.zip 2 points 6 days ago

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.

[–] fubarx@lemmy.world 3 points 6 days ago

Yet another take: https://open.substack.com/pub/cybersect/p/that-secret-service-sim-farm-story

[–] Treczoks@lemmy.world 2 points 6 days ago

I see two potential uses: spam and scam on one side, and DDOSing the cellular network on the other.

I rather suspect the second.