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2w ago

Europol Dismantles SIM-Box Network Tied to 49 Million Fake Accounts

Investigators now target customers of a service that rented numbers from more than 80 countries to hide perpetrators’ identities.

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Cybercrime as a service network taken down in europe: 7 arrested, 1,200 sim boxes seized

Overview

  • A coordinated action on October 10 in Latvia involved 26 searches, resulting in seven arrests and the seizure of 1,200 SIM-box devices operating 40,000 active SIM cards.
  • Authorities seized five servers and took over two service websites, gogetsms.com and apisim.com, which now display law-enforcement seizure notices.
  • Europol links the dismantled platform to more than 49 million online accounts and roughly 3,200 fraud cases, including about 1,700 in Austria and 1,500 in Latvia.
  • Reported losses total around €4.5 million in Austria and €420,000 in Latvia, with crimes spanning phishing, smishing, investment scams, impersonation, extortion, migrant smuggling and marketplace fraud.
  • Bank and cryptocurrency funds and luxury vehicles were seized, and forensic analysis is underway to trace the network’s full scale and identify clients, with Europol, Eurojust and Shadowserver supporting the probe.