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Comment by fiprisoner | Hacker News Reader

>Probably an egress point for scammers and bot farms, and the speculation about local disruptions isn't grounded in anything other than scale?

More likely an egress point for cheap VOIP routing.

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That would be my first guess if the devices were found in the Middle East, but legitimate interconnect in the US is stupid cheap. (See e.g. Twilio's SIP pricing; I assume they have reasonable supply chain security.)

> legitimate interconnect in the US is stupid cheap

This is a to take advantage of "free calls to North America" provided by MVNOs, and free < cheap. Twilio starts at $0.01/min; 1 cent/minute x 200 lines results in a delta of $2.8k per day. I'm assuming a 20% utilization rate[1] on a device that holds 1000 SIMs

Further, it's a way to bypass STIR/SHAKEN requirements for a less-than-legitimate VOIP termination operations, which can attract paying customers that want to evade detection, typically criminal endeavors.

1. 20% utilization is pretty generous, but even if its 2%, not using Twilio is profitable at scale.

0.7 cents per minute for twilio. 47000 minutes in a month = $329/month if you run it around the clock.

Round-robining around some unlim SIM cards to stay below the radar will be cheaper.

Legitimate interconnect is presumably easier to get shut down, so I agree maybe not so much cheap as shady, as in a provider that knows their customers are likely to use the numbers for things that'd make them likely to lose a legitimate interconnect.

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