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Comment by phh | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious why they are using actual modems rather than just doing it with VoWifi that merely requires a SIM card reader (pretty much just an UART)

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Among other things... having hundreds of calls and texts onramping from the same IP would be a rather large red flag.

I'm a little surprised that a behavioral analysis didn't flag these anyway. Probably did, just the networks don't care as long as they get their cut.

>having hundreds of calls and texts onramping from the same IP would be a rather large red flag.

Use VPNs? Surely paying for some subscriptions at $3/month is cheaper than renting an apartment in manhattan?

You'd probably need thousands of residential IP addresses to pass under the radar with so many SIM cards.

There are bot nets that specifically offer such services

...and perfectly legal services too, e.g. joinmassive.com, brightdata, etc. (they're used for gathering listing data from e-commerce sites, job boards, etc.)

disclosure: I'm an investor/advisor in massive.

Somehow, if you have to use residential proxies, its going to he a TOS break.

This IS the botnet that offers the service.

> networks don't care as long as they get their cut.

Pretty clear this is the case, almost all of it could be stopped overnight with a simple whitelist to people you know and a blocklist of countries and regions where you’ll never ever need to take a call from.

They do this so they are harder to track & block. If they were sending over Wifi then they have to hide the IP, so they have to use VPNs, which are often blocked, etc. But with their solution they have a standard SIM on the standard cellular network, so it's nearly indistinquishable from a regular cellphone.

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