Europol Takes Down SIM Farm Operation Behind 49 Million Fake Accounts Globally

So, Europol just revealed that they busted a pretty advanced cybercrime-as-a-service platform that was running a SIM farm, helping people pull off a variety of crimes, from phishing scams to investment fraud. This big law enforcement operation, called Operation SIMCARTEL, involved 26 searches and led to the arrest of seven people, along with the seizure of 1,200 SIM box devices that held about 40,000 active SIM cards. Out of those arrested, five were from Latvia. They also took down five servers and seized two websites, gogetsms.com and apisim.com, on October 10, 2025, replacing their content with a seizure notice. Plus, they confiscated four luxury cars and froze nearly 431,000 euros (around $502,000) from the suspects' bank accounts and another 266,000 euros (roughly $310,000) in crypto. The operation involved authorities from Austria, Estonia, Finland, and Latvia, working together with Europol and Eurojust. Europol estimates this criminal network was linked to over 1,700 cyber fraud incidents in Austria and about 1,500 in Latvia, racking up losses of around 4.5 million euros ($5.25 million) in Austria and 420,000 euros ($489,000) in Latvia. The tech behind this setup was super sophisticated, enabling criminals globally to use it for all kinds of telecom-related cybercrimes.

That is very true. So i believe this sim-farm network made their revenue from what they charge their customers. Crime is now so sophisticated these days and scammers who can afford the right tools have a high chance of successfully hitting victims, and that's why losses from fraud continue to rise. Reading the quote above is all one needs to understand how sophisticated this network was. Providing registered phone numbers from over 80 countries. That is crazy and it is good news that the authorities have dismantled this operation