Investigators are still unraveling the full scale of the service and all the different ways criminals employed it. Customers used the operation’s SIM cards to create at least 49 million different online accounts for illicit purposes.Sellers of illicit SIM-box services – aka SIM-farm providers – enable their customers to easily gain bulk access SIM cards at a low cost. Such services regularly are used to perpetrate mass campaigns involving scam texts, scam calls and posting misleading, fake or phishing messages to social networks. The services enable customers to disguise the SIM card’s real phone number or location.Authorities said phishing and smishing attacks launched by users of the Latvian service were frequently designed to steal passwords, bank details or payment card details from victims. In other cases, the phone numbers were used to perpetrate a type of scam in which criminals pose as a police officer. Mostly targeting Russian speakers, “perpetrators posed as police officers with forged IDs and personally collected funds from the victims,” Europol said.Other specific types of crime police have tied to this SIM-farm service provider included:Marketplace fraud: Fake accounts on such services serve as launch points for phishing and smishing;Daughter-son scams: Messages typically sent on WhatsApp purport to share a child’s new phone number, before “citing alleged spontaneous accidents or emergencies and evoking panic with the victim, they demand urgent payments usually in the four-figure range,” Europol said;Investment fraud: Attacks seek to trick a victim into sending them large sums of money as well as installing remote-control software on their system;Fake entities: Attackers use the rented numbers to make fake or spoofed online banks and storefronts look legitimate.
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