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NYC Telecom Raid: What's Up with Those Weird SIM Banks?
- leakycap 1y agoSuch a cool write-up, I enjoyed the screenshots of the admin interfaces ... which look exactly as bad as I'd hoped 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.
- rr808 1y agoDamn Mobile-X I hadn't heard of them but looks like a good deal. Maybe this is actually a marketing exercise?
- leakycap 1y agoTello isn't quite as cheap as Mobile-X, but for low use it is also great https://tello.com/buy/custom_plans https://tello.com/buy/custom_plans 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.
- qingcharles 1y agoThere are plenty of cheaper, better MVNOs than Mobile X.
- VectorLock 1y agoBetter in what way? MobileX may have some properties that are attractive to criminals.
- leakycap 1y agoMobile-X is cheap and is "pay for what you use" 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
- qingcharles 1y agoMore data etc, lower price.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- leakycap 1y agoI checked less than 90 days ago, and Mobile-X was cheaper than any other MVNO with retail availability in the US. Do you have links to services that cost less, per line/sim? I don't think they exist, especially at retail.
- qingcharles 1y agoI might then be completely wrong.
- leakycap 1y agoDo you want to keep us in suspense, or are these just MVNOs you've heard exist but don't have names of them?
- qingcharles 1y agoOff the top of my head Good2Go is better and cheaper. I don't have the names of any others, but get AI to do a deep search and it'll find a whole bunch and show you stats for them all.
- leakycap 1y agoAI deep research is not needed to see that $4.08 a month for 1GB on Mobile-X is a better value than $10.00 a month for 1GB on Good2Go
- qingcharles 1y ago$5/mo if you pay for a year.
- rr808 1y agoActually I had an extra requirement that it be secure. Mint is pretty good at that and has a brand I trust. Not sure about the other networks.
- mike_d 1y ago> 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 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.
- leakycap 1y ago> MVNOs don't care 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
- toast0 1y agoIt'd depend on the mvno and their costs, but if the user fees pay for the underlying costs, the mvno is making money, and their user numbers go up, which makes for happy graphs. 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.
- rcarmo 1y agoAn MVNO seldom has access to per-cell data. They get the bulk traffic delivered to them (sometimes) and billing info, and that is that.
- neuroelectron 1y agoThis guy claims that it's not that suspicious and not a state-backed operation. https://x.com/ErrataRob/status/1970586083374112784 https://x.com/ErrataRob/status/1970586083374112784
- is_true 1y agoI thought it was someone running a mobile ip proxy
- dilyevsky 1y ago"residential" proxies, ad clickbots, instagram/twitter bots - lots of "legit" use-cases these days
- codedokode 1y agoAd clickbots are a win-win though? Make ad less profitable.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- AnotherGoodName 1y agoCan’t read it since I don’t have a login there but i’m guessing they buy sims from all over the country and sms on matching prefixes since people will assume a local number is less likely to be spam. 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.
- motoboi 1y agoYou don't need a login to read a single tweet.
- AnotherGoodName 1y agoThanks! I was assuming it was a chain with more details than i saw there.
- Scoundreller 1y agoMaybe weird hardware, but easily available on aliexpress. Y’all need to explore more. Appears to be scrubbed off now but used to be more available. 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45353925 ?
- mac-attack 1y agoAt what point does an article shift from giving insights -> giving a step by step to start your own spam farm? 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.
- VectorLock 1y agoI think the author does a good job of showing how commoditized this kind of crime is. There are no special insights here that someone who wanted to do this thing couldn't easily find on their own.
- gruez 1y agoThe author probably turned up everything in the article by searching on google so it's probably not helping anyone unless they want to turn to the dark side right this second
- mac-attack 1y agoI can do a google search for ghost guns too, but once I compile my information and it goes viral on an unrelated site, isn't that still contributing to the visibility (and potentially distribution) of ghost guns?
- otterley 1y agoSo what's the solution? Prohibit talking about the subject? That doesn't seem like the right answer, not to mention it would run afoul of the First Amendment.
- SchemaLoad 1y agoI doubt a random blog post is enabling this. If you are at the point of dropping thousands of dollars on a spam farm you've got the ability to find this stuff yourself. If anything it's highlighting how this stuff works to the average person. 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.
- daft_pink 1y ago“One has to wonder if the rise of eSIMs is designed to make these products obsolete.“ or significantly reduce their labor costs. 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.
- SchemaLoad 1y agoThis seems like a pretty far fetched idea that phone manufacturers are pushing for esim to enable spammers to spam easier, rather than to free up space in phones for a bigger battery.
- mike_d 1y ago> phone manufacturers are pushing for esim [...] rather than to free up space in phones for a bigger battery. 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.
- SchemaLoad 1y agoCarriers are the slowest ones in the process though. Apple has had to drag them kicking and screaming on esim. Physical sims can be purchased in every supermarket. I'd guess the retail stores mostly exist for marketing and selling boomers on overpriced long term plans.
- mschuster91 1y ago> I'd guess the retail stores mostly exist for marketing and selling boomers on overpriced long term plans. ... and for customer support where you need someone to physically identify a customer against a government-issued ID.
- BobbyTables2 1y agoAgree. 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.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- crazygringo 1y agoFor context, the original story from earlier today: Cache of devices capable of crashing cell network is found in NYC (263 points, 251 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45345514 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45345514
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- 1oooqooq 1y agooh that's why google have been silently banning all corporations using gvoice unless they email support for each number to be manually checked for compliance. it's been a few interesting couple months at work, as google being google there was never an announcement or anything.
- est 1y agothe Chinese term for "SIM bank" is 猫池 (Modem pool) it's mostly used to spam SMS and make fraud calls
- numpad0 1y agoThat's cute!
- smoovb 1y agoThe Secret Service is being overly alarmist, but to a hammer, everything looks like a nail. “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.
- otterley 1y agoI suspect the Secret Service is keeping some cards (ahem) close to their chest. It's not difficult to believe that there is other evidence they chose not to publish that distinguishes a garden-variety spamming operation and one that is more nefarious.
- ajross 1y agoIt's not "difficult" to believe, no. But it's easier to believe that cops don't know how radio networks work, though. This is clearly illegitimate, they can tell that much. They just got the use case wrong. It's for fraud, not terrorism.
- otterley 1y ago> 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.)
- ajross 1y ago
- mrheosuper 1y agoI used to have a machine that look like this(A bit smaller tho). 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.
- peterldowns 1y agoHow did that work economically? Who paid for you to do that and how was it worth it for them to do so?
- mrheosuper 1y agoApparently, it worked for them. We don't care about message (as long as it's not too "uncomfortable"). Anyone can use our service. They decide how long to broadcast, we take care the rest. Mind you, we are not in US.
- Shank 1y ago> We would put it on our vehicle and drive around the city to spam sms message. 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?
- mrheosuper 1y agoi don't recall exactly reason, quite a long time since then, but it has something to do with fake number detection and the amount of phone number we can reach.
- monerozcash 1y agoYou were probably driving around with a "SMS Blaster" that didn't use sim cards, no?
- rcarmo 1y ago
- VladVladikoff 1y agoHow can you have that many mobile radios in a small space without interference issues??
- userbinator 1y agoCDMA is magic. They're not all going to be transmitting at the same time either.
- rootsudo 1y agoThis is not CDMA, CDMA is dead it is GSM and most of it will be passive channel and sms is empty bandwidth for the carrier anyway…
- ajross 1y agoThe use case is fraud. You need thousands of burner SIMs to send millions of spam texts. But the way it works, every SIM needs a radio (the negotiation with the network is very heavyweight compared to an SMS transmission, you wouldn't want to bounce between them by constantly reconnecting). So you need thousands of radios.
- costco 1y agoI've read that at least for for GSM VoIP gateway setups, people typically rotate SIMs because it looks suspicious for one customer to be making calls all day. In fact there is a whole industry most people have no idea about dedicated to detecting these so-called grey routes. Having perused some of these offerings, it seems fairly typical to offer 16-32 radios and 256 SIM card slots. For residential proxy setups, I've seen a bunch of 16 port USB hubs with Huawei LTE modems.
- userbinator 1y agoIt's like a multi-SIM phone, taken to the next level. Seeing this comment recently about ultra-cheap 4G LTE modems, I do wonder if one could make something cheaper with a bunch of those connected to a PC: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45250676 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45250676
- VectorLock 1y agoThe device is probably 256 of those, or similar, chipsets on a board with integrated SIM slots and connectors for SMA antennas. You'd have a hard time producing something like this cheaper than China.
- userbinator 1y agoThere's only 64 antennas but 256 SIMs, so there are either 64 separate quad-SIM modems (AFAIK only Mediatek made those, and in 2G only) or it's just one big FPGA, managed by a small CPU and connected to a bunch of RF ICs, like the inverse of a base station.
- VectorLock 1y agoOr there are 64 modems that can switch between 4 SIM slots.
- mumber_typhoon 1y agoThe reason for NYC is probably deploying it in a crowded network area to avoid detection. Deploying it in a suburban space would immediately show red flags.
- daemonologist 1y agoThis is only tangentially relevant, and a violation of the Guidelines, but I looked up the MVNO brand in the Secret Service photo (MobileX) and holy moly every single button on their website just opens a "scan to download the app" modal (or on mobile, takes you directly to the App/Play Store). It also asked for location permissions half a dozen times in as many seconds until I told Firefox to remember my refusal. MobileX, I am not under any circumstances going to install your app.
- nightsd01 1y agoWhy is it exactly, that mobile providers can’t catch this…? Just like with SMS fraud. It might cost them a few cents per subscriber to do effective anti-spam measures, but now society has to pay the cost
- mdani 1y agoThe MVNOs such as MobileX mentioned above do not have their own towers or the cellular backbone i.e. the core network. They'll merely use the MNO such as Verizon or T-Mobile and have a commercial arrangement in which MVNO just handles the marketing and the customer support. So the MVNOs may not have the right tools or data or incentives to catch these sim farms.
- smoovb 1y agoWhy would the mobile provider want to catch it? 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.
- panja 1y agoFCC fines
- VectorLock 1y agoCommon carriers are usually absolved of the malfeasance of their customers.
- justsomehnguy 1y ago> $20 per plan Nope. Cheaper, but still they do pay.
- nelox 1y agoMaybe they did and informed the authorities accordingly.
- rcarmo 1y agoIt depends on how closely they monitor the network and how much these people abused it. A steady, slow increase in calls/messages on a site wouldn’t show up in stats unless there was a lot of constant congestion, and even then most telcos these days outsource a lot of their network monitoring and capacity management to contractors that just don’t care. 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…
- mrbluecoat 1y agoA few more pictures here to get a scale of the operation: https://www.secretservice.gov/newsroom/releases/2025/09/us-secret-service-dismantles-imminent-telecommunications-threat-new-york https://www.secretservice.gov/newsroom/releases/2025/09/us-s...
- void-star 1y agoJust want to say: Thanks! I was waiting for this article. 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!
- rcarmo 1y agoI had an inkling these things existed (I’ve been in telco for a few decades), but the last ones I saw had nowhere near this scale. The amount of manual labor to put in the SIMs _and_ configure/remove the PIN codes must be staggering unless they get a bulk manifest of some sort (which you do get if you order batches of SIM cards for IoT applications), so expect these things to have a CSV import of some kind… 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…
- mungoman2 1y agoI don't really get comments about unreasonable labor in this comment and TFA. It's what, 16x16 = 256 SIM cards per such machine. At 10 seconds per SIM card, that's like an hour to fill one machine. In a week at 8 hours per day you can fill 40 such machines with SIM cards.
- Kenji 1y ago[dead]
- gregoriol 1y agoYeah, I don't think labor is a problem here since the people willing to make this happen somehow also found 1) money to buy these racks, 2) many times 256 SIM cards, 3) a few locations in NYC
- shawnlower2 1y agoAlso, from the article: > The exact devices [..] are sold for an eye-watering $3,730. That seems just a tad bit hyperbolic
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- dsrtslnd23 1y agoYou can find them on Alibaba or similar sites - search for "GSM Modem Pool"
- topranks 1y agoI’m amazed to see this. 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?
- thinkingemote 1y agofound this on twitter: https://x.com/Hannibal9972485/status/1970540224867365060 https://x.com/Hannibal9972485/status/1970540224867365060 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.
- grues-dinner 1y ago> Scammers hijack the call 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.
- Sporktacular 1y agoSo they find some SIM boxes and assume terrorism? It's the way calling card services offer cheap rates to various countries. They suck from a cell planning POV but they're hardly nefarious.
- dzhiurgis 1y agoWonder if something like this would be easier via esim and wifi calling