Oh lol, this is a scam site. Yes, there are potential other uses for a sim box but mostly they are used for VoIP purposes. It's honestly so hard reading quotes from the US government these days. Cartels, drugs, guns. They make it sound like they interrupted the staging of an assault on the UN when the article actually says that the locations were within 35 miles of the UN headquarters in NYC. This is a significant distance as it covers beyond the 5 boroughs, it's the "tri state area". Like 20M people live in that circle. I highly doubt this is for anything other than VoIP scams.
Yup. This is literally just a cellular grey route site for some shitty VoIP provider, just like the SIM box SMS scams go marching on in other countries. Some operator is shitting their pants right now, probably.
The SIM cards come from cheap MVNOs that have dealer arrangements for cheap or free first month activations, then they just set up a handful of SIM boxes and a residential Internet connection back to the mothership (like they did at the captured house with the white Verizon 5G Home router just casually sitting on the floor next to the units).
Similarly, I’ve had some friends on US MVNOs themselves that have access to “free” international calling, yet every time they call (the same) international number the receiving party gets a wildly different caller ID from a wildly different country each time (Poland, Moldova, etc). Also dodgy SIM boxes!
Agreed. These days setups imho aren't vanilla origination and termination VoIP scratch card traffic it's more likely a distributed bot farm obfuscation as a service provider. I have seen commercially available sim bank gateways that can separate the sim from the antenna in order to change towers and simulate movement. The use of eSim adapters make it superscaleable now in terms of abstracting the numbers from the sims. Whatever the application a press release tie in to UN is a little odd.
> Yes, there are potential other uses for a sim box but mostly they are used for VoIP purposes.
So you mean... like, these are the exit points into the "legitimate" telephone network for, say, those random MedAlert scam calls I keep getting from numbers scattered all over North America? Or if not, what does "VoIP" mean here exactly?
Perhaps the Secret Service possesses additional information they're not disclosing that supports their narrative. It might come out at trial, if it gets to that stage. Or, it might not, because certain methods and sources of law enforcement operations might not be publicly disclosed if national security is involved.
The article really should have put that map front and center, because that map alone is enough to show how ridiculously overhyped the government claims are.
I'm presuming this discovery was near the outer perimiter of that circle, because otherwise presumably they'd have quoted a smaller, scarier number.
> Officials said the anonymous communications network, which included more than 100,000 SIM cards and 300 servers, could interfere with emergency response services and could be used to conduct encrypted communication. One official said the network was capable of sending 30 million text messages per minute, anonymously. The official said the agency had never before seen such an extensive operation.
> Investigators found the SIM cards and servers in August at several locations within a 35-mile radius of the United Nations headquarters. The discovery followed a monthslong investigation into what the agency described as anonymous “telephonic threats” made to three high-level U.S. government officials this spring — one official in the Secret Service and two who work at the White House, one of the officials said.
So 100k SIM cards scattered around the middle of New York City.
Probably an egress point for scammers and bot farms, and the speculation about local disruptions isn't grounded in anything other than scale?
The Bad Guys are neat with their cable ties, and number their gateway boxes.
The Bad Guys went with simple heavy-duty metal garage shelving rather than real racking, seemingly vastly overengineered for the weight of the equipment, as that sort of shelving can hold up to a Mg per shelf UDL. The "WallOfSimBoxes" kit does not sport any rack mounting brackets.
The Bad Guys don't use redundant power supplies, or battery backup.
By the way, if you want a quick overview of this kind of equipment if you've never seen it before, here's (randomly picked by Bing Shopping) China Skyline's marketing blurb for a similar 64-port SMS gateway:
Re Shelving: I exclusively buy very similar shelving. It is cheap, reliable, large, and strong. In fact, I have not found any other shelving that can match the performance/price of these.
I buy from Walmart. search their site for "Hyper Tough wire storage shelves"
I'm seriously wondering about the practicality of this operation. Wouldn't that many SIMs on the same spot overload any nearby cell tower? And even if the antennas could stand the load, that many SIMs hugging the network without any logical reason (like a parade or a demonstration) is bound to raise alarms at the network operator HQ. If this is a scam operation, I would expect these boxes to be distributed across several locations.
Oh! Those pics are interesting - the handful on the floor of an appartment feel very different to me from the room with hundreds of them; that's much larger scale.
> The discovery followed a monthslong investigation into what the agency described as anonymous “telephonic threats” made to three high-level U.S. government officials this spring — one official in the Secret Service and two who work at the White House, one of the officials said.
> The agency did not provide details about the threats made to the three officials, but Mr. McCool described some as “fraudulent calls.”
> Investigators have been going through the data on SIM cards that were part of the network, including calls, texts and browser history. Mr. McCool said they expected to find that other senior government officials had also been targeted in the operation.
The article goes out of its way to imply a link between this farm and the threats, but doesn't actually explicitly make that link.
So that's the tip. Makes you really wonder about the iceberg, this raises many more questions than it answers.
The UK has criminalized possessing or using SIM farms or related gear in response to these popping up with some regularity. But the operators are pretty clever and know how to hide. I've been thinking about how easy it would be to detect these when you're a telco and I think the signature is unique enough that it should be possible to detect which SIMs are part of a farm, even if you don't know the exact location of the farm.
1. Sim box operators were running multiple locations for sending spam texts, cheap VoIP for scams, and potentially other phone-related crimes.
2. Operators were associated with other criminal gangs. Maybe directly, maybe indirectly. Someone may have been running a drug side-business from a location.
3. Someone uses this sim box operation to send threatening scam messages that happen to reach these government officials. For whatever reason, they take it seriously.
4. Now that the feds and NYPD have raided this sim box operation, they have to justify why they were doing this. It's probably not directly illegal to run a sim box farm so they are going to play up the threat a bit to get more coverage of the investigation.
I can assure you, a lot more dangerous criminal activity happened within a 35 mile radius of the UN than some zombie cell phones sending scam texts. While I applaud anyone shutting down scams, the window dressing is embarrassing. Someone has watched too much Blacklist or any of those fantastical police procedurals.
The only interesting bit that makes this sound like something more than a VoiP farm
> Telephonic threats to multiple senior U.S. officials this past spring – including multiple people protected by the Secret Service – first triggered the investigation, but officials say the network was seized within the last three weeks.
and guns/drugs
> Investigators also found 80 grams of cocaine, illegal firearms, plus computers and phones.
Maybe cartel tech stuff, but I'm not sure why cartels would mess with threatening politicians.
I don't see where they made the political connection other than the farm was located in range. Maybe they had evidence they didn't share. The site was also in range of Wall Street and everybody else in the city. All kinds of fraud, surveillance, and private comms were possible.
> Telephonic threats to multiple senior U.S. officials this past spring – including multiple people protected by the Secret Service – first triggered the investigation, but officials say the network was seized within the last three weeks.
So you mean they could have shut down these SMS and outbound call spam farms years ago
I would guess that this is still more likely some scam infrastructure middle man setup, and one of their customers chose to use it to make threats / do more than just scam people.
It seems unlikely you'd setup a scam setup like this and out yourself by making threats to government officials via your own infrastructure ...
"It could have overwhelmed cell towers, toppling New York City’s cell service and preventing every Manhattan resident from accessing Google Maps."
Seems odd that the most important use they can highlight for cell service in NYC is accessing Google Maps. Not accessing 911, not some other vital use of cell service, but Google Maps.
NYC is full of free Wifi all over the place. So many McDs, Starbucks, and other restaurants and sites you can get Google Maps anywhere.
What a bizarre story. They say it's an anonymous network. What does that mean when multiple locations with racks of tens of thousands of SIM cards and the supporting equipment are found around NYC area? In order to manage this hardware and the operations around this equipment it would take boots on the ground, at least occasionally, for repairs and maintenance.
No mention of arrests or surveillance of any site to try and apprehend anyone related.
Yeah, they are putting two facts together to heavily imply that they are part of a single story, but there is no evidence presented that they are. "UN leaders are gathering!" "There is a huge SIM farm that could disrupt communications!" Both true, but seemingly unrelated. All those car warranty texts have to come from somewhere - this is probably where.
Exactly. And the whole point of a cellular network architecture is that it's resistant to DoS attacks (what the rubes call "unexpectedly heavy usage"). Sure, you can take a cell out with a hundred fake phones, and all the users in that cell will hop to the next one. Or at worst walk a block over to find another. The attack doesn't scale, at all.
And even if you wanted to deploy custom hardware to do it, it would be far easier to just use a high power jammer on the band anyway than mucking around with all those SIMs.
These are for making actual use of the telecom facilities at scale, with the anonymity you get from burner SIMs. It's fraud, not terrorism.
Both this article and the NYT one strongly implies a link between these farms & the threats to government officials without actually outright stating so.
> “While forensic examination of these devices is ongoing, early analysis indicates cellular communications between nation-state threat actors and individuals that are known to federal law enforcement.”
Criminals and intel services using a criminal network? News at 11.
The Secret Service is really trying to make hay out of these things being close to UN, but so are millions of other things in the New York City Metro Area. Either they have intelligence they aren't disclosing or someone's try to put a lot of spin on this crime bust.
"The agency said on Tuesday that last month it found more than 300 SIM servers and 100,000 SIM cards that could have been used for telecom attacks within the area encompassing parts of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut."
Isn't it costly to acquire that many SIM cards? Or maybe they were inactive until they were associated with an account? So it was just to keep allowing for a rotating set of SIM accounts?
Are we going to find out that all these cellphones were used to run bots on X or similar?
I'm curious how this would work without being traced. Someone is paying rent on the apartments. For the simcards, I think they are all able to call 911 even if they don't have credit/dataplan. They're also able to connect to a tower and take up slots. So probably the only way to financially trace the simcards is the initial purchase.
[+] [-] belter|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] wildzzz|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] kotaKat|5 months ago|reply
The SIM cards come from cheap MVNOs that have dealer arrangements for cheap or free first month activations, then they just set up a handful of SIM boxes and a residential Internet connection back to the mothership (like they did at the captured house with the white Verizon 5G Home router just casually sitting on the floor next to the units).
Similarly, I’ve had some friends on US MVNOs themselves that have access to “free” international calling, yet every time they call (the same) international number the receiving party gets a wildly different caller ID from a wildly different country each time (Poland, Moldova, etc). Also dodgy SIM boxes!
[+] [-] jimmySixDOF|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Hizonner|5 months ago|reply
So you mean... like, these are the exit points into the "legitimate" telephone network for, say, those random MedAlert scam calls I keep getting from numbers scattered all over North America? Or if not, what does "VoIP" mean here exactly?
Somehow I've missed this entire phenomenon...
[+] [-] CoastalCoder|5 months ago|reply
Same year as the Phineas and Ferb reboot. Coincidence???
[+] [-] otterley|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] vidarh|5 months ago|reply
I'm presuming this discovery was near the outer perimiter of that circle, because otherwise presumably they'd have quoted a smaller, scarier number.
[+] [-] unknown|5 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] pavel_lishin|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] tjwebbnorfolk|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] tbrownaw|5 months ago|reply
> Investigators found the SIM cards and servers in August at several locations within a 35-mile radius of the United Nations headquarters. The discovery followed a monthslong investigation into what the agency described as anonymous “telephonic threats” made to three high-level U.S. government officials this spring — one official in the Secret Service and two who work at the White House, one of the officials said.
So 100k SIM cards scattered around the middle of New York City.
Probably an egress point for scammers and bot farms, and the speculation about local disruptions isn't grounded in anything other than scale?
[+] [-] JdeBP|5 months ago|reply
The Bad Guys are neat with their cable ties, and number their gateway boxes.
The Bad Guys went with simple heavy-duty metal garage shelving rather than real racking, seemingly vastly overengineered for the weight of the equipment, as that sort of shelving can hold up to a Mg per shelf UDL. The "WallOfSimBoxes" kit does not sport any rack mounting brackets.
The Bad Guys don't use redundant power supplies, or battery backup.
[+] [-] JdeBP|5 months ago|reply
* https://chinaskyline.net/sk-gsm-voip-gateway/esim-64-ports-s...
[+] [-] novaleaf|5 months ago|reply
I buy from Walmart. search their site for "Hyper Tough wire storage shelves"
[+] [-] Maken|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] trebligdivad|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] otterley|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] pavel_lishin|5 months ago|reply
> The agency did not provide details about the threats made to the three officials, but Mr. McCool described some as “fraudulent calls.”
> Investigators have been going through the data on SIM cards that were part of the network, including calls, texts and browser history. Mr. McCool said they expected to find that other senior government officials had also been targeted in the operation.
The article goes out of its way to imply a link between this farm and the threats, but doesn't actually explicitly make that link.
The CNN article covering the same story does the same thing: https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/23/us/swatting-investigation-ser...
The Secret Service statement, however, does make that claim explicitly in the first sentence: https://www.secretservice.gov/newsroom/releases/2025/09/us-s...
[+] [-] 1121redblackgo|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] engineer_22|5 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] eagrt4tdg|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] jacquesm|5 months ago|reply
The UK has criminalized possessing or using SIM farms or related gear in response to these popping up with some regularity. But the operators are pretty clever and know how to hide. I've been thinking about how easy it would be to detect these when you're a telco and I think the signature is unique enough that it should be possible to detect which SIMs are part of a farm, even if you don't know the exact location of the farm.
[+] [-] wildzzz|5 months ago|reply
1. Sim box operators were running multiple locations for sending spam texts, cheap VoIP for scams, and potentially other phone-related crimes. 2. Operators were associated with other criminal gangs. Maybe directly, maybe indirectly. Someone may have been running a drug side-business from a location. 3. Someone uses this sim box operation to send threatening scam messages that happen to reach these government officials. For whatever reason, they take it seriously. 4. Now that the feds and NYPD have raided this sim box operation, they have to justify why they were doing this. It's probably not directly illegal to run a sim box farm so they are going to play up the threat a bit to get more coverage of the investigation.
I can assure you, a lot more dangerous criminal activity happened within a 35 mile radius of the UN than some zombie cell phones sending scam texts. While I applaud anyone shutting down scams, the window dressing is embarrassing. Someone has watched too much Blacklist or any of those fantastical police procedurals.
[+] [-] dmix|5 months ago|reply
> Telephonic threats to multiple senior U.S. officials this past spring – including multiple people protected by the Secret Service – first triggered the investigation, but officials say the network was seized within the last three weeks.
and guns/drugs
> Investigators also found 80 grams of cocaine, illegal firearms, plus computers and phones.
Maybe cartel tech stuff, but I'm not sure why cartels would mess with threatening politicians.
[+] [-] mcny|5 months ago|reply
This sounds more like someone's personal property or a small party and not a commercial operation?
[+] [-] imglorp|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Scoundreller|5 months ago|reply
So you mean they could have shut down these SMS and outbound call spam farms years ago
…but just didn’t have the motivation
[+] [-] duxup|5 months ago|reply
It seems unlikely you'd setup a scam setup like this and out yourself by making threats to government officials via your own infrastructure ...
[+] [-] cactusplant7374|5 months ago|reply
The word only is doing a lot of work here. There are also pictures of the equipment.
[+] [-] panarky|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] hnbear|5 months ago|reply
Seems odd that the most important use they can highlight for cell service in NYC is accessing Google Maps. Not accessing 911, not some other vital use of cell service, but Google Maps.
NYC is full of free Wifi all over the place. So many McDs, Starbucks, and other restaurants and sites you can get Google Maps anywhere.
[+] [-] easyat|5 months ago|reply
No mention of arrests or surveillance of any site to try and apprehend anyone related.
[+] [-] geetee|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] randomfrogs|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] seanieb|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] ajross|5 months ago|reply
And even if you wanted to deploy custom hardware to do it, it would be far easier to just use a high power jammer on the band anyway than mucking around with all those SIMs.
These are for making actual use of the telecom facilities at scale, with the anonymity you get from burner SIMs. It's fraud, not terrorism.
[+] [-] 762236|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] hackeraccount|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] pavel_lishin|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] thenthenthen|5 months ago|reply
Edit: removed tracking id
[+] [-] xnx|5 months ago|reply
"In addition to jamming the cellular network, he said, such a large amount of equipment near the United Nations could be used for eavesdropping."
How could a SIM farm be used for eavesdropping?
[+] [-] seanieb|5 months ago|reply
> “While forensic examination of these devices is ongoing, early analysis indicates cellular communications between nation-state threat actors and individuals that are known to federal law enforcement.”
https://www.secretservice.gov/newsroom/releases/2025/09/us-s...
[+] [-] jandrese|5 months ago|reply
The Secret Service is really trying to make hay out of these things being close to UN, but so are millions of other things in the New York City Metro Area. Either they have intelligence they aren't disclosing or someone's try to put a lot of spin on this crime bust.
[+] [-] mmastrac|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] delfinom|5 months ago|reply
This was probably just a phone botnet for online botting purposes, where you want IP addresses in not-obviously-third-world bot countries.
[+] [-] bhouston|5 months ago|reply
Isn't it costly to acquire that many SIM cards? Or maybe they were inactive until they were associated with an account? So it was just to keep allowing for a rotating set of SIM accounts?
Are we going to find out that all these cellphones were used to run bots on X or similar?
[+] [-] hyperhopper|5 months ago|reply
Seems like a nation-state level attack from somebody that has millions to spend to keep this up their sleeve
[+] [-] comrade1234|5 months ago|reply