- Europol’s Simcartel operation dismantled a fraudulent global network of SIM boxes in four countries
- Criminals have used SIM boxes to spoof calls, create fake accounts and commit telecommunications fraud.
- More than 49 million accounts linked to scams; losses exceeded 4.5 million euros in Austria alone
Law enforcement agencies in Austria, Estonia, Finland and Latvia, as well as Europol, have seized thousands of SIM-box devices and SIM cards used in multiple fraud campaigns.
Police launched Operation Simcartel on October 10 in Latvia, carrying out 26 searches and immediately arresting five people, also seizing around 1,200 SIM-box devices, 40,000 SIM cards and five servers with additional infrastructure.
A SIM-box device is a piece of hardware containing multiple SIM cards and used to route international phone calls over local mobile networks to avoid official carrier charges. Criminals (and some businesses) use it to make international calls appear as local calls, bypassing legitimate carriers.
Very sophisticated actors
“Hundreds of thousands” of SIM cards were also seized, Europol added, two websites defaced and two other 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 very sophisticated and allowed perpetrators around the world to use this SIM-box service to commit a wide range of telecommunications-related cybercrimes, as well as other crimes,” Europol explained.
The criminal enterprise offered registered phone numbers to people from more than 80 countries and allowed other criminals to create fake accounts on social media and communications platforms.
Europol estimates that more than 49 million online accounts were created through this criminal enterprise and has managed to attribute it to more than 1,700 fraud cases in Austria and 1,500 in Latvia.
Total losses are in the millions, with financial losses in Austria alone amounting to around 4.5 million euros. In Latvia it amounted to around €420,000.
The criminal network enabled a “multitude of serious crimes”, the report said, including online second-hand market fraud, daughter-in-law scams, investment fraud, fake shops and bank websites, and scams against fake police officers.
Via BeepComputer
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