An international law enforcement operation, codenamed SIMCARTEL, led by Europol and Latvian authorities, dismantled a major cybercrime-as-a-service (CaaS) platform on October 10, 2025, resulting in the seizure of 1,200 SIM box devices, 40,000 active SIM cards, and five servers used to facilitate global fraud.
The operation, which involved coordinated raids across multiple countries, led to the arrest of seven suspects, including five Latvian nationals, and disrupted a network responsible for enabling over 49 million fake online accounts and more than 3,200 cyber fraud cases across Europe.
The dismantled network, operating under the guise of a legitimate service, provided criminals with temporary phone numbers from over 80 countries to mask their identities, enabling a wide range of crimes including phishing, smishing, investment fraud, extortion, migrant smuggling, and the distribution of child sexual abuse material (CSAM).
The two primary websites used to advertise the service, gogetsms.com and apisim.com, were seized and replaced with law enforcement splash pages announcing their takedown.
The criminal infrastructure was described as highly sophisticated, designed to provide scalability and anonymity to its clients, allowing them to create fake social media, banking, and e-commerce accounts for fraudulent purposes.
Financial losses attributed to the network exceeded EUR 4.5 million in Austria and EUR 420,000 in Latvia, with authorities freezing EUR 431,000 in bank assets and USD 333,000 in cryptocurrency, and confiscating four luxury vehicles.
The operation was a joint effort involving law enforcement agencies from Austria, Estonia, Finland, and Latvia, supported by Europol and Eurojust, with technical assistance from the Shadowserver Foundation.
