Did You Know What a SIM Farm Is?

Did You Know What a SIM Farm Is?

At each location, a mobile phone is placed.

Each phone contains multiple SIM cards.

Each SIM card contains hundreds of accounts.

Each account follows and interacts with users.

These accounts register on various social media platforms and engage in endless online arguments, debates, disputes, and battles.

SIM card farms are devices capable of accommodating multiple SIM cards from different telecommunications companies. These devices use Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology to send and receive messages or make group calls.

Although this technology was initially developed for legitimate purposes, such as making low-cost international calls, it has become a cornerstone of organized scams targeting large audiences—phishing emails and fraudulent phone calls.

Scams have become extremely sophisticated. Phishing emails, text messages, and caller ID spoofing are all techniques that give scammers this advantage, said Eva Velásquez, President and CEO of the Identity Theft Resource Centre.

Europol announced on Friday the disruption of a sophisticated cybercrime-as-a-service (CaaS) platform that operated a SIM card farm, enabling its clients to commit a wide range of crimes, from phishing to investment fraud.

The coordinated law enforcement effort, dubbed Operation SIMCARTEL, involved 26 raids, resulting in the arrest of seven suspects and the seizure of 1,200 SIM boxes containing 40,000 active SIM cards. Five of those arrested are Latvian nationals.

In addition, five servers advertising the takeover of the service on October 10, 2025, were taken down to display a seizure banner. In a separate incident, four luxury cars were seized, and €431,000 ($502,000) was frozen from the suspects' bank accounts, along with €266,000 ($310,000) from their cryptocurrency accounts.

49 million accounts from a single website in a single country... This number is enough to put an end to the pointless arguments and battles on social media. The person you're arguing with won't waste your time and energy, and in the end, they might just be a machine.

Sources :
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/how-sim-farms-like-the-one-found-near-the-un-could-collapse-telecom-networks

https://www.wired.com/story/sim-farm-new-york-threatened-us-infrastructure-feds-say/

https://thehackernews.com/2025/10/europol-dismantles-sim-farm-network.html