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But why does the amount sim cards matter for this scam? How many hundreds of sim cards do you need? Surely it’s easy to find other people to buy sim cards for you?

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Because they need to change SIM's all the time. There are websites listing suspicious numbers, simply Googling the number reveals if the number is is used for scamming. Unsuccessful or successful attempts often result someone writing about it in one of those phone number websites.

I don't know if the SIM card limit is by national ID number or operator but there are not that many GSM operators in Bulgaria anyway, it's a small country. There were more before but they merged and now there are 3 in total.

But surely the victims are not sophisticated enough to google numbers?

And even if they are, how hard can it be to find some poor people to go get 10 sim cards for 10 euros? I know that wouldn’t be hard at all in my village.

Or to just corrupt one guy working for the telco and get unlimited SIMs registered using fake IDs?

Or not corrupt anyone and just go get SIM cards with trivial to fake Romanian ID cards?

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