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NYC Telecom Raid: What's Up with Those Weird SIM Banks?


A recent Secret Service raid uncovers an insane network of SIM cards—along with the oddest piece of hardware I’ve ever seen. Here’s the deal with the SIM bank.

When I learned that the Secret Service had taken down a giant “SIM farm” in the NYC area, I immediately had two thoughts: One, “Wow, that sounds like the reason we all get so many scam calls.” And two, “Holy crap, what is that weird-ass piece of hardware?!?!??!?!??!?!??!?! The longer answer: The devices in the Secret Service photo, apparently made by a Chinese company called Ejoin Technology, are used in VoIP settings to handle lots of SIM cards. The kind of interface that people who hate SMS junk messages love to hate.In this context, these are basically spam machines, and whoever ran this network—whether a state actor or a criminal scheme—had dozens of them, each costing the price of a high-end laptop.

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