[easyat]

What a bizarre story. They say it's an anonymous network. What does that mean when multiple locations with racks of tens of thousands of SIM cards and the supporting equipment are found around NYC area? In order to manage this hardware and the operations around this equipment it would take boots on the ground, at least occasionally, for repairs and maintenance.

No mention of arrests or surveillance of any site to try and apprehend anyone related.

[aesh2Xa1]

The details are skimpy. In a CNN article we can see photos and mention that these were housed in apartment units and perhaps other rentals.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/23/us/swatting-investigation-ser...

EDIT:

While the headline on NYT highlights an attack on the towers for disruption, the CNN piece gives more weight to two other uses: (1) criminal communication network and (2) swatting.

I think those two make sense. The SIMs would probably hold US numbers and would appear authentic for accessing the US operators' networks.

[jacquesm]

(2) is the thing that brought attention of LE on these, and likely was a very dumb move by one of the users of this system. If just (1) they could have kept it going for much longer, (2) is what brought it down.

[immibis]

(2) shouldn't have brought it down because it's not illegal to be a pipeline for someone else's swatting, though you have to help LE identify who did the swatting to the extent you can (including if that's not at all).

[jacquesm]

A reminder not to take legal advice from HN.

[Retr0id]

I don't see why you'd actually need any SIMs in the first place if you wanted to DoS a cell tower. My guess is that it's basically just a device farm for either sending spam or receiving activation codes for spam accounts elsewhere. By putting them in a populated area, the increase in traffic is less noticeable.

[jacquesm]

It makes it much harder to nail down exactly where the farm is. You can't just go break down all the doors in a large high-rise and the reflections of the radio signals in the urban canyon will further hamper your ability to pin-point the devices. But you might be able to correlate power consumption or heat signature with activity.

[Loudergood]

100,000 sims connecting to a cell network in Vermont will crash things. In midtown Manhattan that's a blip.

[jacquesm]

That much capacity could easily overwhelm things that scale poorly. 911 service for instance.

[bflesch]

Could be as simple as faking app downloads for the NYC area to raise the appstore ranking

[trebligdivad]

Yeh very weird; I mean if it was just spammers then you wouldn't bothered putting it in somewhere expensive like NY would you?

[dvdkon]

With that many devices, you'd need to have them in some place with very dense cell service.