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Comment by mike_d | Hacker News Reader

I am very familiar with the hardware being used in that operation and Rob is 100% correct.

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.

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I not familiar with any of it, so I’m willing to take your word, but doesn’t the scope raise some eyebrows?

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?

No way, whatever the sim hardware cost is and the sim service per month for the carrier.

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.

Each one of those units is probably ~$6k for the device and sim cards. I don't think there were that many of them in the pictures to add up to $900k.

The article describes 300 servers and 100,000 SIMs across a handul of locations.

In some countries you can find entire office blocks filled with people who do nothing all day but participate in scam enterprises. I don't think the scale of this phone bank, if its as described, is that surprising really.

They made cold calling illegal in my country. Also you cannot just sell customer data. It made an entire industry disappear and nobody mourned.

But I'm sure some American lawyer would call that a breach of the constitution.

How does your country protect against callers and data sales outside of its jurisdiction?

>Is that sort of outlay typical for phone scammers.

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.

It was maybe $50k in hardware at each site.

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.

The SS is either incompetent and watches too many movies or they are deliberately trying to spin this as some state actor terrorism thing.

Does anyone remember the Boston mooninite panic? This is exactly the kind of incompetence I can think of over at the secret service.

ok, fine, then why place it in NYC? it's a mobile phone, it could be anywhere.

NYC has cellular density for bandwidth to be available and enough traffic so this does not raise red flags with mobile operator. Do this in nowhere Oklahoma and providers would probably notice very quickly.

Probably a lot of places to buy MVNO sim cards from with cash as well.

Then why not another tech hub like SV or Seattle?

Because you happen to live in NYC.

sensible

There are undoubtedly SIM farms there too. They just didn’t happen to catch the eye of the feds yet

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