- Europol’s Operation Simcartel dismantled a global SIM box fraud network across four countries
- Criminals used SIM boxes to spoof calls, create fake accounts and commit wire fraud
- Over 49 million accounts linked to fraud; the losses exceeded 4.5 million euros in Austria alone
Law enforcement authorities from Austria, Estonia, Finland and Latvia, together with Europol, have seized thousands of SIM box units and SIM cards used in several fraud campaigns.
Police launched Operation Simcartel on October 10 in Latvia, conducted 26 searches and immediately arrested five people, and also seized approximately 1,200 SIM box units, 40,000 SIM cards and five servers with additional infrastructure.
A SIM box device is a piece of hardware that holds multiple SIM cards and is used to route international phone calls over local mobile networks to avoid official carrier charges. 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 seized, Europol added, two websites defaced and two more people arrested. The forces also seized hundreds of thousands in various currencies (USD and EUR) as well as four luxury cars.
“The criminal network and its infrastructure were technically highly sophisticated and enabled perpetrators worldwide to use this SIM box service to carry out a wide range of telecommunications-related cybercrimes as well as other crimes,” Europol explained.
The criminal enterprise offered phone numbers registered to people from more than 80 countries and allowed other criminals to create fake accounts for social media and communication platforms.
Europol believes that more than 49 million online accounts were created using this criminal enterprise and that it managed to attribute to it more than 1,700 cases of fraud in Austria and 1,500 in Latvia.
Total losses are counted in the millions, while economic losses in Austria alone amount to approx. €4.5 million. In Latvia it was around €420,000.
The criminal network enabled a “host of serious crimes”, the report further states, including scams on online used marketplaces, daughter-son scams, investment scams, fake shop and fake bank websites and fake police officer scams.
Via Bleeping Computer
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