Europol dismantles cybercrime network linked to $5.8M in financial losses

European law enforcement dismantled a sophisticated SIM farm operation called "SIMCARTEL" used to support phishing, account intrusions, credential and financial data theft, investment scams, extortion and other frauds; the action resulted in seven arrests, seizure of ~1,200 SIM boxes (40,000 active SIMs), additional hundreds of thousands of SIMs, five servers, two websites, luxury vehicles, and frozen bank/crypto funds. Investigators linked the network to over 3,200 fraud cases and traced services to more than 49 million created accounts provided to criminals across 80+ countries, highlighting the global scale and abuse risk of SIM box infrastructure.