- Europol’s Operation Simcartel dismantled a global network of SIM box scams in four countries
- Criminals 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, together with Europol, have seized thousands of SIM-box devices and SIM cards used in multiple scam campaigns.
Police launched Operation Simcartel on October 10 in Latvia, carrying out 26 searches and immediately arresting five people, 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 contains multiple SIM cards and is used to route international phone calls over local mobile networks to avoid official carrier rates. Criminals (and some companies) use it to make international calls appear local, bypassing legitimate operators.
Very sophisticated actors
“Hundreds of thousands” of SIM cards were also confiscated, Europol added, two websites were defaced and two more people were arrested. The forces also seized hundreds of thousands of dollars 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 from around the world to use this SIM box service to carry out a wide range of cybercrimes related to telecommunications, as well as other crimes,” Europol explained.
The criminal enterprise offered registered phone numbers to people in more than 80 countries and allowed other criminals to create fake accounts on social networks 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.
The total losses are in the millions: in Austria alone the financial losses amount to approximately 4.5 million euros. In Latvia, it was about 420,000 euros.
The criminal network enabled a “multitude of serious crimes,” the report further states, including online secondhand marketplace fraud, daughter-son scams, investment fraud, fake store and bank websites, and fake police officer scams.
Through beepcomputer
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