Europol dismantles Latvian platform servicing phishing scammers, investment fraud

Europol has announced the disruption of a sophisticated cybercrime-as-a-service (CaaS) platform. According to the agency, the Friday operation caused a dent in a platform that operated a SIM farm and enabled its sets to carry out diverse crimes ranging from phishing scams to investment fraud.

In a statement by the agency, the operation, dubbed Operation SIMCARTEL, saw 26 strategic searches carried out in a coordinated law enforcement effort. Europol mentioned that the operation resulted in the arrest of seven suspects and the seizure of 1,200 SIM box devices, which contained more than 40,000 active SIM cards.

Five of the detained suspects were Latvian internationals. The Latvian police mentioned in an announcement that the platform was related to anonymous communication and payments, impacting more than 3,200 people in different countries.

Europol apprehends suspects in CaaS platform disruption

Europol also claimed that it dismantled five servers tied to the operation, taking over two websites, gogetsms[.]com and apisim[.]com, that were used to advertise the services. The websites have since been branded with a banner stating that it has been seized by authorities. In addition, four luxury vehicles were confiscated, with €431,000 ($502,000) in suspects’ bank accounts and €266,000 ($310,000) in their cryptocurrency accounts frozen by Europol.

The operation consisted of law enforcement from countries like Austria, Latvia, Finland, and Estonia, in collaboration with Europol and Eurojust.

In its statement, Europol said the criminal network was responsible for more than 1,700 individual cyber fraud cases in Austria and 1,500 cases in Latvia. The agency also claimed that victims have lost a cumulative €4.5 million ($5.25 million) and €420,000 ($489,000) in the two countries, respectively, due to their services and operations.

“The criminal network and its infrastructure were technically highly sophisticated and enabled perpetrators around the world to use this SIM-box service to conduct a wide range of telecommunications-related cybercrimes, as well as other crimes,” the agency said.

The network offered telephone numbers registered to people from over 80 countries for use in criminal activities, including setting up fake social media accounts on different platforms to obscure the location and original identity of the user.

Law enforcement details the scale of the operation

In total, Europol claimed that the service enabled the creation of more than 49 million accounts online. These accounts are then used to carry out wide-scale phishing campaigns or to trick victims into investing in fake or bogus trading schemes.

Another type of scam involved contacting people and posing as their relatives. They claim that they now have a new number and ask them to transfer funds, which are always in four digits, to a new number to quickly sort out an emergency.

Some of the offenses that the platform facilitated included extortion, migrant smuggling, and the distribution of child sexual abuse materials.

According to snapshots from the Internet Archive, GoGetSMS was dubbed as a platform where people could get “fast and secure temporary phone numbers.” The platform promised potential customers up to 10 million numbers to choose from and noted that they could receive verification from over 160 online servers.

On its website, GoGetSMS also provides users with the ability to monetize existing SIM cards by turning them into powerful assets to generate passive income using specialized software. This way, users earn revenue for every SMS message that is sent to them. Users have also complained that they have been scammed by the platform. “Tried multiple times, wasted both time and money. Support is completely unresponsive – no help, no refund, nothing,” a user said on Trustpilot.

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