I mean yeah, it was kinda obvious that they busted an ad fraud sim farm but needed to pad that resume for the bosses. There's no glory in "just" fighting fraud right now.
That Secret Service SIM farm story is bogus
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Re: That Secret Service SIM farm story is bogus
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
>having hundreds of calls and texts onramping from the same IP would be a rather large red flag. Use VPNs? Surely paying for some subscriptions at $3/month is cheaper than renting an apartment in manhattan?
You'd probably need thousands of residential IP addresses to pass under the radar with so many SIM cards.
There are bot nets that specifically offer such services
Re: That Secret Service SIM farm story is bogus
#13First thing that came to my mind was SimFarm (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimFarm). And I was really confused.
Re: That Secret Service SIM farm story is bogus
#14First thing I thought when reading it. This story makes no sense. Nothing they mentioned in the article is actually illegal. Having lots of phones (even in a rack-mount form factor) isn't illegal. Even if the phone network could conceivably be DoSed with that many phones all calling at once, it's not illegal unless you actually do that or intend to do it. And their other justification was that this equipment could be…
> Nothing they mentioned in the article is actually illegal.
What about sending spam and threaths over one of these SIMs? I'm pretty sure that warrants legal action.
Re: That Secret Service SIM farm story is bogus
#15> That’s not a thing, that’s not a valid reason to grant anonymity under normal journalistic principles. It’s the “Washington Game” of “official leaks”, disseminating propaganda without being held accountable.
Yeah makes a lot of sense when framed like this, the timing of the secret service of all people busting this 'huge' operation was far too suspicious.
Re: That Secret Service SIM farm story is bogus
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
You'd probably need thousands of residential IP addresses to pass under the radar with so many SIM cards.
There are bot nets that specifically offer such services
...and perfectly legal services too, e.g. joinmassive.com, brightdata, etc.
(they're used for gathering listing data from e-commerce sites, job boards, etc.)
disclosure: I'm an investor/advisor in massive.
Re: That Secret Service SIM farm story is bogus
#17Both scenarios could be right?
It could be just a scam bot farm but a scam bot farm with the intention of targeting vulnerable UN delegates with scams not necessarily to disrupt any cell tower?
Re: That Secret Service SIM farm story is bogus
#18I'm curious why they are using actual modems rather than just doing it with VoWifi that merely requires a SIM card reader (pretty much just an UART)
Among other things... having hundreds of calls and texts onramping from the same IP would be a rather large red flag. I'm a little surprised that a behavioral analysis didn't flag these anyway. Probably did, just the networks don't care as long as they get their cut.
> networks don't care as long as they get their cut.
Pretty clear this is the case, almost all of it could be stopped overnight with a simple whitelist to people you know and a blocklist of countries and regions where you’ll never ever need to take a call from.
Re: That Secret Service SIM farm story is bogus
#19I mean yeah, it was kinda obvious that they busted an ad fraud sim farm but needed to pad that resume for the bosses. There's no glory in "just" fighting fraud right now.
Ironically, the Secret Service's PR people missed a trick with the press release. They could have painted this in a way that strongly resonated with people.
Just tell people that this is the sort of setup that is used by (overseas) scammers to send messages to thousands of potential victims at a time to rope them into various scams.
Fighting scammers is a hugely popular thing with the general public. No need to dress it up with that U.N. nonsense to get the general public's approval. People wouldn't even have minded that the Secret Service ended up uncovering a scammer support operation whilst tracking down something else.
Re: That Secret Service SIM farm story is bogus
#20Both scenarios could be right? It could be just a scam bot farm but a scam bot farm with the intention of targeting vulnerable UN delegates with scams not necessarily to disrupt any cell tower?
You're right, it could be the sensible most likely thing AND the far-fetched thing.