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The SCIF @TheIntelSCIF - SIM farm powering 49 MILLION FAKE ACCOUNTS used for GLOBAL FRAUD dismantled by Europol.
Operation SIMCARTEL involved officers of multiple law enforcement units and authorities in Austria, Estonia, Finland, and Latvia, where the 26 searches were conducted.
According to the European agency, the illegal service helped create more than 49 million fraudulent online accounts. Authorities so far have linked to some of them to 1,700 fraud cases in Austria and 1,500 Latvia.
Among the crimes facilitated by this service are fraud, extortion, migrant smuggling, online marketplace scams, “daughter-son” money transfer requests on WhatsApp, investment fraud through fake brokers, fake shops and bank sites, and impersonation of police officers.
The financial damage caused by these activities is estimated to be approximately EUR 4.5 million ($5.3 million) in Austria and EUR 420,000 ($490,000) in Latvia.
During the SIMCARTEL operation, which occurred on October 10, the police arrested five Latvian nationals and two other suspects and seized the following items in the raids:
1,200 SIM-box devices operating 40,000 SIM cards
Hundreds of thousands of SIM cards
Five servers and two websites
EUR 431,000 ($500,000) frozen in bank accounts and $333,000 in crypto accounts
4 luxury vehicles
They enable large-scale financial fraud, where billions in assets can be siphoned undetected.
The anonymity factor makes tracing cybercriminals significantly more difficult for law enforcement.
These platforms can propagate harmful content, including materials tied to illicit activities or abusive practices.
The pervasive nature of SIM farm use demonstrates why addressing this technology is crucial to reducing vulnerabilities in the digital ecosystem.
Shaping a Safer Cyberfuture Through Regulation