NYC Telecom Raid: What's Up with Those Weird Sim Banks?
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The Secret Service raided a NYC telecom operation involving suspicious SIM banks, sparking discussion on their purpose, potential misuse, and the implications for mobile security.
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Sad to see Mobile-X MVNO as the preferred SIM in the photos shown, but I wonder if an MVNO has local-level data to detect a situation like this when hundreds of phones are in one area and don't move. Postpaid carriers running their own network might easily connect the dots between SIM/accounts/phone towers... but the piggyback nature of MVNO network management probably makes even detecting this behavior even harder.
Do you have links to services that cost less, per line/sim? I don't think they exist, especially at retail.
I don't think there's some other seedy reason - Mobile-X is just the least expensive option I know of right now in the US that can be purchased at retail, so that is probably the main reason
$4.08 a month for 1GB on Mobile-X
is a better value than
$10.00 a month for 1GB on Good2Go
If you use an Apple Watch cellular, Verizon's Visible seems to be the best price currently but sadly doesn't have a pay-for-use option.
MVNOs don't care because they collect the profit without having to deal with any of the network issues. The carriers in turn only care when it impacts performance for legitimate customers, as they also see a piece of the pie.
This is an excellent point
I assumed there would be anti-fraud measures blocking this kind of activity, but if this is a paying customer it isn't necessarily fraud/bad to the carrier or mvno
They can also cancel or limit sims that do too much messaging or calling, which drives new user signups and makes more happy graphs. Doesn't really matter to them if all the abusers live in the same office.
Increased volume also likely reduces their unit costs with the underlying operator and messaging/calling providers, so even break even abusers help their bottom line by increasing margins for normal customers.
Praising the device and stating how cool it is? Highlighting how inexpensive it is? Screenshots of how it works? Saying where you can buy it from?
The line is blurry but this article has all of that. Here's to responsible journalism and being inundated with more spam on my phone so that a newsletter gets more clicks.
This problem isn't going to be solved by making information about the devices more obscure. It's going to be solved by technical preventions and legal action against the senders.
https://x.com/ErrataRob/status/1970586083374112784
This explains using such a bank. You want to cover as many prefixes as possible and you can’t match area codes with traditional sms services.
[1] https://bsky.app/profile/erratarob.bsky.social [2] https://cybersect.substack.com/p/that-secret-service-sim-far...
I actually did see the tweet in full it turns out. It's just that there's not much content so i figured "oh it's one of those twitter thread chains i can't read".
SO much value in being able to root out garbage sales calls
Local number has become an spam signifier for me
Here in the UK, all landline residential numbers start with an area code that starts 02 for London and 01 for the rest of the coountry (eg 020 for London and 0114 for Sheffield).
Mobile numbers here all start 07 here, and the first 5 digits are carrier specific - but so many people port their numbers that it becomes meaningless pretty quickly. But years ago you could spot a number an know what provider the caller was on.
---
Are residential and mobile numbers similar in the States?
It was very shocking to me how many minutes cell phone plans had in the US when I moved there (it was ... a while ago) compared to France.
But also: in the US, calling someone on their cell cost the same as calling someone on a land line. In France, calling someone on their cell from a land line was something like 4x more per minute.
Really, the structure of phone costs (both land and cell) in the US was quite different.
Not the good old days of spending money to browse the internet at 28.8kbps.
IIRC, we had to pay for any kind of use on a cell phone use (both to make and receive calls), which is probably stemmed from them being considered premium devices when they were introduced, with a lot of expensive fixed infrastructure you'd use no matter the direction of the call.
02 dialling codes are used in more than just London; Northern Ireland and Coventry phone numers start with 02 for example.
Then London changed to 081/071, then all changed to 01xxx (eg 0564 to 01564, 081 to 0181), then finally London, Southampton, Belfast and a few others mixed to 02x and 8 digits.
03 became national geographic numbers and things like 0345 and 0500 were phased out, 0800 remained free but not always with mobiles, 0845 was “local” but was basically premium, 0870 was even more, 0898 was super premium etc
But as phones took off in the 00s everyone just had 07 with 9 digits. Not sure when that will fill up, but it feels like a billion numbers is enough for now.
The UK (and Australia) set up a separate prefix for mobile calls. They were more expensive to call. You also knew if you could text someone because it was a mobile number.
The US had analog cell phones for longer and they were introduced to be in the same area code so counted as a "local" call (vs "long distance") for anyone calling that number. The receiver also paid to receive that call, originally.
I honestly don't know how landlines are charged now. It's been probably 20 years since I've had one. Some cheaper cell phone plans might have limited minutes but it's way more common to have unlimited talk and text to any US domestic number (landline or cell).
Oh we had 1800 that were "toll free" meaning they didn't incur long distance charges, originally but this doesn't really apply now. Also, they ran out of 1800 numbers so pretty much anything 18xx is a toll free number.
Note the 1 in front too. That's also a US thing. It technically indicates you're making a "long distance" call. More specifically, you're specifying an area code.e Modern smartphones don't generally require you to type in the 1. Old phones did.
So if you were on a 718 number and call someone else on a 718 number, you could just use the 7 digits of their number. This isn't something people really do anymore. But if you had to call a 646 number you'd put in 1-646-123-4567 back in the day.
By the way, the cell phone numbers being in a given area code explains this joke [1].
Oh the UK/Australia system had its issues too, like it mattered if you were calling from Vodafone to another Vodafone user or if it was an Orange or BT cutstomer because you were charged differently and it could count against different free minutes pools. And you really had no way of knowing.
I don't believe the US had that kind of issue or, they did, it was so long ago that nobody remembers.
[1]: https://xkcd.com/1129/
There is still a similar issue of not knowing whether an area code is for another country in the North American Numbering Plan. It’s fairly common for me to see an unfamiliar number and be unsure whether it’s from the US or Canada, for instance, without additional context.
In old days the numbers were distinct but these days the overview just says "mostly mobile" or "mostly landline": https://digst.dk/media/x3tmvqsl/nummerplan_2020_farver.pdf
Still not gonna help if you have cookies disabled because of the rate limiting, but hey.
https://xcancel.com/ErrataRob/status/1970586083374112784
With the additional advantage of giving you a view more like threadreader.app, or something. Without having to install anything.
https://nitter.poast.org/ErrataRob/
Someone used an online SMS service to send threatening messages to a member of the Gleichschaltung squad, and the secret service traced the SIM card back to one of these rented apartments. The reason it was linked to a "Chinese state sponsored blah blah blah" is because most Chinese criminal operations in the US have some indirect benefit to the Chinese government, which is why they are allowed to operate.
You could use this hardware to launch some sort of a flooding attack, but given the density all you are going to knock out is the one cell site all your devices are talking to. If China wanted to knock out cell service around the UN they would use the hundreds of thousands of backdoored Android phones in New York to launch a more distributed attack.
Using the prices quoted in TFA they’re talking about $900,000 in servers and another $500,000 in SIM cards, before labor, rent and electricity.
Is that sort of outlay typical for phone scammers.
Also on a technical note is there an advantage to having all your sites in the NYC area? Is it simply that there’s enough cell traffic, the bad actors illicit traffic won’t stand out?
But I'm sure some American lawyer would call that a breach of the constitution.
NYC is just high density, remember cell means cellular so the towers are configured for high traffic and more fall back, also being easy to go around in general, airports etc
Esims go for $5-10 a month. Hardware is less than 20k max. Apartment and general utilities are a sunk cost.
Really yes. If they're just selling VOIP routing to the US, they can sell essentially unlimited amounts of it. The more you invest, the more you profit. Grows organically and exponentially.
They operate a bunch of cellular modems that send SMS spam, receive SMS verification codes for creating fake accounts, and use the data to act as proxies for web scraping and other nonsense. It isn't criminal, but it isn't exactly ethical either. But it is profitable.
You have to go swap out some of the SIM cards every day to get new numbers, so you need to balance spreading your locations out across multiple cell towers for throughput, but also needing to be within reasonable travel distance.
Does anyone remember the Boston mooninite panic? This is exactly the kind of incompetence I can think of over at the secret service.
It's like landing in Saudi Arabia and saying, "All the women here wear head covering, that doesn't look normal to me"...
Meanwhile on the flipside the authorities hype it up to be some state-sponsored threat, as if to say "Look citizen, your very competent government is keeping you safe! Trust us!"
The secret service spun it as a terror threat in the same way your orthopedist tells you your teeth problem comes from bad posture.
I mean, the thing might be used to jam the networks (one would have to check that the devices still work when using all the antennas simultaneously), but that really sounds like an awful lot of effort for a disruption that’s neither guaranteed nor that distuptive. I mean, this would create some chaos for sure, but law enforcement and emergency services use radio to communicate. 99% of businessses use wired phones. So this would mostly affect what? deliveries?
A large scale spam operation is way more plaisible.
That the secret service is directly under Trump may also explain why they spun it as potential terrorism stuff. it’s part of their effort to make people believe that America is under terror threat, so that they can legitimize power grabbing…
The site may be being hugged to death currently i can see posts on ddg but it can't be reached.
I think this explains why the spam texts I receive never show up as an iMessage or rcs. This thing-a-ma-hugger doesn’t support it.
It is being pushed by the carriers because retail locations are their biggest overhead expense, for what is basically a place to go pick up a SIM card.
... and for customer support where you need someone to physically identify a customer against a government-issued ID.
Was never much a fan of eSIMs, but after seeing them in action, I kinda like it. Saved me inconvenient trips and delay.
Yes, it’d be nice to just be able to move a sim from one device to the next. In practice, I’ve only done that a few times in the past 20 years, about as often as I switch carriers. So, kinda a wash.
Hoping if phone suddenly breaks, can get new eSIM as easily.
it's mostly used to spam SMS and make fraud calls
“We need to do forensics on 100,000 cell phones, essentially all the phone calls, all the text messages, anything to do with communications, see where those numbers end up,” "You can’t text message, you can’t use your cell phone. And if you coupled that with some sort of other event associated with UNGA, you know, use your imagination there, it could be catastrophic to the city."
So until we do our jobs, imagine the worst case scenario. Thanks guys.
Could be rent US a number service, data roaming, VOIP or SMS termination, account registration (google, tiktok, whatsapp).
There are data roaming services that use 5G GSM modems to transfer the SIMs tower connection to pocket wifi devices for tourists who need data.
This is clearly illegitimate, they can tell that much. They just got the use case wrong. It's for fraud, not terrorism.
How do you know?
(BTW, I'm not suggesting that you are wrong. I have no idea. But in my experience with Federal law enforcement operations related to technology, they're not typically so incompetent as to confuse a fraud ring for a more serious operation. I choose to give them the benefit of the doubt.)
I'm all for having a productive discussion, but casual exaggerations and half-truths aren't helpful. If you just don't trust LE, that's fine (and quite understandable), but that's a more honest thing to say than that you know something contradictory with absolute certainty.
[1] This one is at the top of the front page as we speak: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45357693
And it’s not sealioning; I'm not making a bad-faith argument to wear you down. I’m saying something really simple: unless you know something with absolute certainty, especially about a situation that doesn’t involve you, expect to be challenged when you claim you do. We have qualifying vocabulary for this very purpose. It’s why reporters use the word “alleged” when referring to criminal defendants who haven’t been convicted. It’s a pretty straightforward principle, and there are plenty of responsible people out there who formulate their doubts with the requisite nuanced writing. If I can do it, anyone can.
And no, it’s not unreasonable to demand that someone support their unqualified claims of certainty. It will be the Secret Service’s responsibility to eventually substantiate their claims, too.
You only need this many for bulk messaging/calling. Legitimate bulk messaging/calling would be going through sip providers and SMS aggregators and/or interconnection with carriers at the kind of volumes you'd have this many sim boxes for. So it's got to be fraud/abuse of some sort. Probably selling bulk sms/calling to users that can't or don't want to use legitimate providers.
My machine was for...spamming text sms. We would put it on our vehicle and drive around the city to spam sms message.
We stop doing that now since it's not really effective anymore.
But our machine having same form factor does not mean they have same functionality.
Mind you, we are not in US.
Why would you drive around? You can just put it in one place and spam. It doesn't change the network connectivity or the numbers or anything to drive, except perhaps running from law enforcement?
They're not all going to be transmitting at the same time either.
If these guys are paying MobileX for 256 sims per bank * 64 sim banks = 16,384 sims and say $20 per plan = $327,680 per month of company income.
Nope.
Cheaper, but still they do pay.
Plus if they’re using legacy 2G/3G, it’s not the shiny thing that most telco network quality crews care about for customer experience…
Plus I’m wondering what exactly are the radio capabilities of these things with so many antennae close to each other. Anyway, anyone doing network planning would hardly notice a few dozen registered subscribers unless they started generating traffic heavily (in which case they’d probably saturate one sector of a cell, but not with SMS and LTE…)
What a delightfully arcane rabbit hole to get into today, I’m going to do some research…
> The exact devices [..] are sold for an eye-watering $3,730.
That seems just a tad bit hyperbolic
no idea if its accurate. the replies appear to be disagreeing with it
>>>
It’s a Telecom Bypass Scam Using SIM Farms…Grey-routing is when international calls are re-routed through SIM farms like the one in those photos, instead of going through legitimate telecom carrier infrastructure.
Someone overseas makes a call to a U.S. number Let’s say someone in Nigeria calls a U.S. bank or friend.
Normally, the call would be routed through official international telecom carriers, and each leg of that call would cost money.
The person calling (or their carrier) pays international calling fees to reach the U.S. phone network.
Scammers hijack the call and reroute it through their SIM farm
Instead of going through legit U.S. carrier infrastructure like AT&T or Verizon, the call:
Enters a VoIP (internet call) gateway.
Is then re-routed to one of the SIM cards in the SIM farm, which is sitting on U.S. soil and connected to a local mobile network (like T-Mobile or Boost).
This SIM answers and makes the call look like a local one like it’s just a guy in Houston calling a local pizza shop.
The call completes, but the real telecom carriers get screwed
The call appears as a local mobile call on U.S. networks, not international traffic. For the record, someone may find this interesting.
The scammers avoid all the expensive international “termination” fees.
The telcos (Verizon, AT&T, etc.) get paid nothing, because it looks like local traffic.
Meanwhile, the grey-router charges the VoIP client a discounted rate, pockets the cash, and repeats the process at scale.
How do you do this bit? Is the caller deliberately cooperating, or they think they're using a real service?
I remember calling transcontinentally in the noughties - I would top up an international calls account. If I recall, I had bought a card from a shop with a scratch-off panel. To call first call a local number, then enter my account number. I would pay local rates for the call which were bundled with the contract, so free on the margin, and the call would cost me some pennies per minute from my calls account.
I have no idea how they completed the call, but I was thrilled as it was just before the time when you could just use apps, and the calls would have been ruinous otherwise. For all I know the whole network was a scam. Things like phone cards, money remittance etc, all seem pretty scammy anyway at the best of times.
I imagine this could work the same way.
it's been a few interesting couple months at work, as google being google there was never an announcement or anything.
Cache of devices capable of crashing cell network is found in NYC (263 points, 251 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45345514
I’d have assumed the way to spam SMS is having some sort of dodgy SS7 connection somewhere?
Wild that the radio interface is the way to connect to the network for this.
And spoofing caller id is easy you shouldn’t need local SIMs?
Thanks to Ernie Smith, to tedium.co, to HN, to community.
This is the kind of curious and intelligent response to FUD that I want to find whenever major news outlets start an insane new spin-cycle (as increasingly is the way of things in the world).
I’ll let the HN comment thread spin out (as it must), but amidst that, I just want to say that this right here is the reason I still keep coming back to this place and read all of it. So, thanks!
Great post/read!
Tbh, contraptions like this have a long history for gray-market VoIP call termination, but usually in countries where governments charge a lot for incoming international calls as means of fund-raising (or inefficient telecoms) but domestic rates are low.
Merge with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45353925 ?
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