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What sane cellular carrier would issue tens of thousands of sims to a party like this? There do appear to be a few different colors / designs of sims in the photos but still there has to be some shady back-end dealings with cellular carriers for this to even be plausible.

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The packaging in one of the photos is a MVNO. It's easier to get sims for a MVNO than a carrier, but either way, there's tons of sim card resellers, they have to be getting inventory from carriers/MVNOs. Ask a hundred resellers for 1000 sims each, and you'll get to 100k. 1000 sims may be a lot for some resellers, but is probably small for many of them.

Presumably they issued tens of thousands of SIMs to hundreds of accomplices using hundreds of false names each.

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