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Comment by dmix | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 80 grams of cocaine

This sounds more like someone's personal property or a small party and not a commercial operation?

80 grams is a whole bunch. I agree it isn't "cartel operation" amount, but it is definitely a dealer.

Yeah, this makes the guy sound like a mid-high end career criminal. Sells coke to Wall Street guys in the morning. Gets shipments of weird hardware during the day that he drives over to buildings and sets up according to their directions. Probably runs crypto scams or card duping or whatever else is good for a buck whenever there is a chance.

Iunno, some people buy years worth of car at a time to save money instead of by-the-weekend as they consume it.

If you know of a better risk-free, tax-free ROI than 20%+ in a year

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.

It's possible after some threats they decided to probe cell network behaviour around some buildings downtown. And this particular farm wasn't the original source, just something they found in the process.

So you mean they could have shut down these SMS and outbound call spam farms years ago

…but just didn’t have the motivation

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 ...

> The only interesting bit that makes this sound like something more than a VoiP farm

The word only is doing a lot of work here. There are also pictures of the equipment.

I mean as opposed to the narrative about threatening New York and UN. Being able to spam the phone networks isn't very novel and the location isn't super relevant AFAIK.

Hard to see how 100,000 SIMs are needed to make a few anonymous threats.

Yeah I'm skeptical about the political threat angle being directly connected to this set up. The press release was vague about the connection for a reason.

It's a remote phone number as a service system, and some customer of the service used it to make anonymous threats. On the whole, it's a good thing this outfit got shut down, as one of the primary customers of such services are large scale social media bot farms.

But none of that is illegal. The government, and especially the secret service, has no business shutting it down. This is the equivalent of them shutting down a Tor exit relay and then writing an article about how they shut down a Tor exit relay used for crime, complete with pictures of server racks, servers, switches and cables to show how sophisticated the operation is

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