This guy claims that it's not that suspicious and not a state-backed operation.
Someone used an online SMS service to send threatening messages to a member of the Gleichschaltung squad, and the secret service traced the SIM card back to one of these rented apartments. The reason it was linked to a "Chinese state sponsored blah blah blah" is because most Chinese criminal operations in the US have some indirect benefit to the Chinese government, which is why they are allowed to operate.
You could use this hardware to launch some sort of a flooding attack, but given the density all you are going to knock out is the one cell site all your devices are talking to. If China wanted to knock out cell service around the UN they would use the hundreds of thousands of backdoored Android phones in New York to launch a more distributed attack.
Using the prices quoted in TFA they’re talking about $900,000 in servers and another $500,000 in SIM cards, before labor, rent and electricity.
Is that sort of outlay typical for phone scammers.
Also on a technical note is there an advantage to having all your sites in the NYC area? Is it simply that there’s enough cell traffic, the bad actors illicit traffic won’t stand out?
NYC is just high density, remember cell means cellular so the towers are configured for high traffic and more fall back, also being easy to go around in general, airports etc
Esims go for $5-10 a month. Hardware is less than 20k max. Apartment and general utilities are a sunk cost.
But I'm sure some American lawyer would call that a breach of the constitution.
Really yes. If they're just selling VOIP routing to the US, they can sell essentially unlimited amounts of it. The more you invest, the more you profit. Grows organically and exponentially.
They operate a bunch of cellular modems that send SMS spam, receive SMS verification codes for creating fake accounts, and use the data to act as proxies for web scraping and other nonsense. It isn't criminal, but it isn't exactly ethical either. But it is profitable.
You have to go swap out some of the SIM cards every day to get new numbers, so you need to balance spreading your locations out across multiple cell towers for throughput, but also needing to be within reasonable travel distance.
Does anyone remember the Boston mooninite panic? This is exactly the kind of incompetence I can think of over at the secret service.
This explains using such a bank. You want to cover as many prefixes as possible and you can’t match area codes with traditional sms services.
[1] https://bsky.app/profile/erratarob.bsky.social [2] https://cybersect.substack.com/p/that-secret-service-sim-far...
I actually did see the tweet in full it turns out. It's just that there's not much content so i figured "oh it's one of those twitter thread chains i can't read".
Still not gonna help if you have cookies disabled because of the rate limiting, but hey.
SO much value in being able to root out garbage sales calls
Local number has become an spam signifier for me
Here in the UK, all landline residential numbers start with an area code that starts 02 for London and 01 for the rest of the coountry (eg 020 for London and 0114 for Sheffield).
Mobile numbers here all start 07 here, and the first 5 digits are carrier specific - but so many people port their numbers that it becomes meaningless pretty quickly. But years ago you could spot a number an know what provider the caller was on.
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Are residential and mobile numbers similar in the States?
It was very shocking to me how many minutes cell phone plans had in the US when I moved there (it was ... a while ago) compared to France.
But also: in the US, calling someone on their cell cost the same as calling someone on a land line. In France, calling someone on their cell from a land line was something like 4x more per minute.
Really, the structure of phone costs (both land and cell) in the US was quite different.
Not the good old days of spending money to browse the internet at 28.8kbps.
IIRC, we had to pay for any kind of use on a cell phone use (both to make and receive calls), which is probably stemmed from them being considered premium devices when they were introduced, with a lot of expensive fixed infrastructure you'd use no matter the direction of the call.
02 dialling codes are used in more than just London; Northern Ireland and Coventry phone numers start with 02 for example.
Then London changed to 081/071, then all changed to 01xxx (eg 0564 to 01564, 081 to 0181), then finally London, Southampton, Belfast and a few others mixed to 02x and 8 digits.
03 became national geographic numbers and things like 0345 and 0500 were phased out, 0800 remained free but not always with mobiles, 0845 was “local” but was basically premium, 0870 was even more, 0898 was super premium etc
But as phones took off in the 00s everyone just had 07 with 9 digits. Not sure when that will fill up, but it feels like a billion numbers is enough for now.
The UK (and Australia) set up a separate prefix for mobile calls. They were more expensive to call. You also knew if you could text someone because it was a mobile number.
The US had analog cell phones for longer and they were introduced to be in the same area code so counted as a "local" call (vs "long distance") for anyone calling that number. The receiver also paid to receive that call, originally.
I honestly don't know how landlines are charged now. It's been probably 20 years since I've had one. Some cheaper cell phone plans might have limited minutes but it's way more common to have unlimited talk and text to any US domestic number (landline or cell).
Oh we had 1800 that were "toll free" meaning they didn't incur long distance charges, originally but this doesn't really apply now. Also, they ran out of 1800 numbers so pretty much anything 18xx is a toll free number.
Note the 1 in front too. That's also a US thing. It technically indicates you're making a "long distance" call. More specifically, you're specifying an area code.e Modern smartphones don't generally require you to type in the 1. Old phones did.
So if you were on a 718 number and call someone else on a 718 number, you could just use the 7 digits of their number. This isn't something people really do anymore. But if you had to call a 646 number you'd put in 1-646-123-4567 back in the day.
By the way, the cell phone numbers being in a given area code explains this joke [1].
Oh the UK/Australia system had its issues too, like it mattered if you were calling from Vodafone to another Vodafone user or if it was an Orange or BT cutstomer because you were charged differently and it could count against different free minutes pools. And you really had no way of knowing.
I don't believe the US had that kind of issue or, they did, it was so long ago that nobody remembers.
There is still a similar issue of not knowing whether an area code is for another country in the North American Numbering Plan. It’s fairly common for me to see an unfamiliar number and be unsure whether it’s from the US or Canada, for instance, without additional context.
In old days the numbers were distinct but these days the overview just says "mostly mobile" or "mostly landline": https://digst.dk/media/x3tmvqsl/nummerplan_2020_farver.pdf
https://xcancel.com/ErrataRob/status/1970586083374112784
With the additional advantage of giving you a view more like threadreader.app, or something. Without having to install anything.
The site may be being hugged to death currently i can see posts on ddg but it can't be reached.
It's like landing in Saudi Arabia and saying, "All the women here wear head covering, that doesn't look normal to me"...
Meanwhile on the flipside the authorities hype it up to be some state-sponsored threat, as if to say "Look citizen, your very competent government is keeping you safe! Trust us!"
The secret service spun it as a terror threat in the same way your orthopedist tells you your teeth problem comes from bad posture.
I mean, the thing might be used to jam the networks (one would have to check that the devices still work when using all the antennas simultaneously), but that really sounds like an awful lot of effort for a disruption that’s neither guaranteed nor that distuptive. I mean, this would create some chaos for sure, but law enforcement and emergency services use radio to communicate. 99% of businessses use wired phones. So this would mostly affect what? deliveries?
A large scale spam operation is way more plaisible.
That the secret service is directly under Trump may also explain why they spun it as potential terrorism stuff. it’s part of their effort to make people believe that America is under terror threat, so that they can legitimize power grabbing…