Europol Dismantles SIM Farm Network Powering 49 Million Fake Accounts Worldwide thehackernews.com/2025/10/e…

Europol on Friday announced the disruption of a sophisticated cybercrime-as-a-service (CaaS) platform that operated a SIM farm and enabled its customers to carry out a broad spectrum of crimes ranging from phishing to investment fraud.

The coordinated law enforcement effort, dubbed Operation SIMCARTEL, saw 26 searches carried out, resulting in the arrest of seven suspects and the seizure of 1,200 SIM box devices, which contained 40,000 active SIM cards. Five of those detained are Latvian nationals.

In addition, five servers were dismantled and two websites gogetsms[.]com and apisim[.]com) advertising the service was taken over on October 10, 2025, to display a seizure banner. Separately, four luxury vehicles were confiscated, and €431,000 ($502,000) in suspects' bank accounts and €266,000 ($310,000) in their cryptocurrency accounts were frozen.

The countries that participated in the operation comprised authorities from Austria, Estonia, Finland, and Latvia, in collaboration with Europol and Eurojust.