“Coup mission.” On October 10, during operation “SIMCARTEL”, Latvian law enforcement agencies arrested two more suspects, shut down five servers and confiscated 1,200 SIM boxes as well as 40,000 active SIM cards. Austrian, Estonian and Latvian investigators, together with Europol and Eurojust, attributed more than 1,700 cases of cyber fraud in Austria and 1,500 in Latvia to the criminal network, causing total damage of several million euros: around 4.5 million in Austria and 420,000 euros in Latvia.
This sophisticated criminal network provided SIM boxes and phone numbers from over 80 countries to criminals around the world. “It allowed criminals to create fake accounts on social networks and communication platforms, which they then used to commit cybercrimes, hiding their true identity and location,” the European agency reports in a press release on its site.
According to the agency, phishing and smishing were used to steal personal and banking information, “leading to identity theft, financial loss, and malware infections.” During this extensive operation, 26 searches were carried out, 5 people were arrested and around 1,200 SIM boxes containing 40,000 SIM cards, as well as hundreds of thousands of other cards, were seized.
Five servers and two websites offering the illegal service were neutralized, while more than €431,000 and $333,000 were frozen in the suspects’ bank and crypto accounts. In addition, four luxury vehicles were seized. The true scale of the network remains to be seen, with more than 49 million online accounts created through the service.
Other crimes were also facilitated, such as fraud, extortion, migrant smuggling and the distribution of child pornography, “demonstrating the scale and dangerousness of the activities made possible by this criminal service.” Last May, Europol had already dismantled another, more or less similar, criminal network, dubbed “the DDoS Empire.”
Source: BFM TV
