HN Reader

> 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 with, like aliexpress@mydomain.com, paypal@mydomain.com, banking@mydomain.com and so on. I'd like to have one phone number per company or whatever that I have to interact with, so that if they sell my data to third parties and I suddenly start getting advertisement/spam calls, I can figure out exactly who was acting badly.

“Euro Cop” sounds like Jean-Claude Van Damme movie.

I wish one day INTERPOL would share a list of those fake accounts instead of vehicle photos.

I don't think this comment will contribute much, so please forgive that, but calling a "Collaboration between Europol and the Shadowserver Foundation" for "Euro cops" is probably the most Australian thing I've ever seen on the entire internet.

https://www.europol.europa.eu/media-press/newsroom/news/cybe...

There are much more tech photos in local news media:

https://rus.delfi.lv/57863/criminal/120091647/foto-video-v-h...

why are taxes being used to moderate Facebook?

I wonder what people used to do with these fake 41M accounts. I suspect alot for influencing conversations online.

I misinterpreted the title and thought the cops used 49M fake accounts to take down the network

Dead Internet Theory

Is 49M a lot?

This 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?

International police appear to be targeting these massive sim-dependent fraud/scam operations. Probably not difficult to track these hot spots.

These 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)

> 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?

The reason why SIM boxes exist, is because in many countries you cannot buy a SIM card anonymously, and because every site now wants your phone number.

That's probably the cause why I cannot get an Australian phone number nor data plan for my month long business visit here.

3 different prepaid SIM's cannot get registered with my foreign Austrian passport. Roaming is way too expensive here. Telstra support tells me to call their free support number, nice catch 22. I cannot use my phone, only hotel, company or free wifi. There is no free wifi, because hackers. Telstra website sends my password to my new phone number via SMS, which is not yet activated. Catch 22. Or they just claim unknown error. I've tried all providers.

Telstra customer service gives me a date for a personal visit (so I can actually get my password to finish registration), but then at the date there is no appointment alotted. I got another date, but then my month long visit will be already over.

Every 14 year old Asian kid tries to hack into everything here. If access cards, wifi or web pages. It's the wild east here.

If websites didn't force insecure SMS 2FA, these services wouldn't be neccesary. It's like we can't have nice things anymore because criminals can't have nice things so you can't have them either.

Try entering a landline whenever you're asked a phone number for your account. They say the number is invalid, which I find insulting because I know my number very well and it's been around for longer than those websites.

And now this article insults me again by saying it's only used for criminal activities.

The gall.