The Secret Service discovered a SIM card farm that could have knocked out cell phone service in New York City.

In recent years, the US has seen a surge in hoax calls about shootings and threats. High-ranking politicians and judges have become victims of swatting. Recently, the US Secret Service uncovered and dismantled a major network that used tens of thousands of SIM cards and servers to orchestrate such attacks. CNN tells the details of the operation.

Swatting (from the word SWAT - a special police unit in the USA) is a deliberate false a bell to emergency services with a report of a serious crime (e.g. shooting, hostage-taking, bomb).

The goal is to call for a SWAT team or police to arrive at the specified address in order to frighten or harm the victim.

Swatting is most often used:

• as a form of online revenge or bullying;
• against politicians, celebrities, streamers;
• to the detriment of ordinary people on the Internet.

This is a very dangerous practice: the police arrive armed, and there have been cases where people have been injured or killed due to swatting.

A wave of false calls

December 25, 2023 male rang He called a suicide prevention hotline. He claimed he had shot his girlfriend and was planning to kill himself. Police responded but turned around before reaching the scene. It turned out to be a false alarm—swatting at the home of Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene in Georgia.

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Five days later, a similar situation occurred with Republican Senator Rick Scott in Florida.

The hoax calls then continued to target other officials: a federal judge presiding over Donald Trump's efforts to overturn the election results, then-Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley, and the Maine secretary of state.

A month after Donald Trump won his second presidential bid, several of his US Cabinet nominees and future administration officials have also been subjected to swatting and threats.

No attacks or shootings occurred; the threats turned out to be false. However, according to Matt McCool, head of the Secret Service's New York office, the wave of swatting posed a real and "imminent threat" to the protection of high-ranking officials.

The scale of the operation

Six months ago, a new unit, the Advanced Threat Interdiction Unit, was created. Its mission was to uncover the complex network hidden behind burner phones, number swapping, and SIM cards.

Other agencies involved in the investigation included the Department of Homeland Security, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the New York City police, and regional law enforcement agencies.

The investigation led agents to an apartment near New York City. Other rented premises were then discovered. No one was inside. But the agents uncovered the largest network in the history of the Secret Service—more than 100,000 SIM cards and 300 SIM servers, concentrated within a radius of approximately 55 kilometers from New York City.

These servers could be remotely controlled, creating a huge flow of telephone traffic and quickly swapping SIM cards to throw federal agencies off the trail.

According to McCool, the system's power allowed it to send an encrypted and anonymous message to every US resident within 12 minutes. It could also cripple cell towers and render New York City without service, depriving all Manhattan residents of access to services like Google Maps.

Locations and scale of the threat

Electronic "safe houses" were discovered in Armonk, New York, Greenwich, Connecticut, the New York City borough of Queens, and New Jersey. They effectively formed a ring around New York City's telecommunications infrastructure.

There have been no arrests so far, but preliminary analysis suggests the network was used by both foreign governments and criminal groups in the United States.

"This includes cartels, human traffickers, terrorists," McCool clarified. "The network was well-funded and organized."

Law enforcement officials said the network has already been dismantled and no longer poses a threat to New York City. But McCool warned, "It would be naive to assume similar networks don't exist in other parts of the country."

"The potential for disruption to our nation's telecommunications from this network of devices cannot be overstated," said Secret Service Director Sean Curran.

The investigation involved SIM cards from MobileX.

"We are fully prepared to cooperate with authorities if contacted. Our platform is designed for convenience and cost-effectiveness, but these same qualities sometimes attract attackers. MobileX has robust security mechanisms in place, and we identify and block suspicious activity daily," assured Peter Adderton, founder and CEO of MobileX.