“Euro Cop” sounds like Jean-Claude Van Damme movie.
Except Van Damme is no cop.
https://www.euronews.com/culture/2025/04/03/jean-claude-van-...
Euro cops take down cybercrime network with 49M fake accounts
31–40 of 100 posts
Re: Euro cops take down cybercrime network with 49M fake accounts
#32These burner phone numbers not exclusively used by criminals, a privacy-minded person would use those to make accounts on services that require a phone number (and sadly, it feels like there's a lot of these lately)
If you look at these companies it's never aimed at the privacy enthusiast use case. They are aiming for mass-sms outreach, anti-bot measures and sell them in bundles of 1000s.
Mass SMS is illegal on the part of the sender, not any intermediary services. Anti-anti-bot is a good thing since anti-bot is destroying the internet.
Re: Euro cops take down cybercrime network with 49M fake accounts
#33This is a legitimate service also used by privacy minded individuals - just like the recent similar raid in the USA. What's the actual crime here?
Re: Euro cops take down cybercrime network with 49M fake accounts
#34This is a legitimate service also used by privacy minded individuals - just like the recent similar raid in the USA. What's the actual crime here?
Per another article : Europol und Eurojust, were able to attribute to the criminal network more than 1 700 individual cyber fraud cases in Austria and 1 500 in Latvia, with a total loss of several million euros. The financial loss in Austria alone amounts to around EUR 4.5 million, as well as EUR 420 000 in Latvia.
So I guess they were providing legitimate business while doing scams at the same time.
Re: Euro cops take down cybercrime network with 49M fake accounts
#35> In the raid, authorities seized 1200 SIM boxes, with the devices containing 40,000 active SIM cards Realistically, wouldn't that look suspicious to a cell tower if 40k sims log in from one location?
Can they know the SIM location precisely? I believe they can only triangulate multiple towers to determine a radius. If they could pinpoint a specific, narrow location, it'd be easier to spot unusual concentration.
Re: Euro cops take down cybercrime network with 49M fake accounts
#36> The coordinated takedown, codenamed Operation SIMCARTEL, took place on October 10 in Latvia, as part of a joint investigation by police in the Baltic nation, Austria, Estonia and Finland. Not the best way to see my country in the news, but oh well. That said, I wish I could reasonably do something similar to what's possible with e-mails: where you can have one mailbox per account/company you want to do interaction…
Honest question, how well does it go for for email ? I did that pretty seriously for a while, and in my case I feel it led to nothing specific. I'd get spam from weird places and shut the address, but that would actually amount to an extremely small amount of the total spam I was getting. Also my ISP or the phone company was selling away my email and there was no way I'd just block them, nor would they give a shit ab…
The advantage isn't necessarily about blocking addresses but them not being able to be correlated. Nowadays every product sends your email to ad providers (Facebook, etc), sometimes in hashed form. Using unique addresses per company defeats such tracking.
Similarly they also do it with the phone number, which is also why the techbros hate these SIM farms so much.
Re: Euro cops take down cybercrime network with 49M fake accounts
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
I personally like the idea that my bank account has a completely different email and password then any other account. In theory, criminals don't know where to even try to exploit/phish.
Yes. BTW I still do that, but with a single address, username+myonlinebank@domain.com style. It was easier when I need to give them my email again on the phone or in other circumstances, they can see it's just the same with extra bits.
I tried this route at first. There are enough stupid forms that reject VERP addresses that it's easier to just use different recipients.
Re: Euro cops take down cybercrime network with 49M fake accounts
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
> In every country in Europe people are pissed with their government and hate the police Objectively false [1]. Europe is pissed at government (~30% approval) and love the police (70% approval). Hating on police is an US thing exclusively. 1: https://opendata.cbs.nl/#/CBS/nl/dataset/80518ned/table
Okay, I may be exaggerating a bit the European's attitudes towards their local police and governments(some small and cold countries tend to trust their local police and government more than the larger countries at sunny places) but here you can see that EU is consistency viewed more favorably than the local ones through the years: https://europa.eu/eurobarometer/surveys/detail/3372
Maybe edit and clarify your misinformation that Europeans hate the police? We don't.
Re: Euro cops take down cybercrime network with 49M fake accounts
#39This is a legitimate service also used by privacy minded individuals - just like the recent similar raid in the USA. What's the actual crime here?
Network operators have a right to know who is using their pipes.
Re: Euro cops take down cybercrime network with 49M fake accounts
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Okay, I may be exaggerating a bit the European's attitudes towards their local police and governments(some small and cold countries tend to trust their local police and government more than the larger countries at sunny places) but here you can see that EU is consistency viewed more favorably than the local ones through the years: https://europa.eu/eurobarometer/surveys/detail/3372
Maybe edit and clarify your misinformation that Europeans hate the police? We don't.
The trust levels in Police is much lower in larger countries. In Germany it’s %50 and %35. NL is not the rule, it’s the exception.
But sure, hating the police is an exaggeration. Still, I think it’s obvious that its for illustrative purposes and not a declaration. Just like everybody never means every single person no exceptions when talking about general situations. It’s like when you say “everyone knows that the flat earth theory is BS”. Yes it’s not everybody and your mileage may vary depending on the location.