Comment by JdeBP
5 months ago
Looking at the original press release (https://www.secretservice.gov/newsroom/releases/2025/09/us-s...) and the attached high-resolution photographs, there are things that probably leap out at a Hacker News readership:
The Bad Guys are neat with their cable ties, and number their gateway boxes.
The Bad Guys went with simple heavy-duty metal garage shelving rather than real racking, seemingly vastly overengineered for the weight of the equipment, as that sort of shelving can hold up to a Mg per shelf UDL. The "WallOfSimBoxes" kit does not sport any rack mounting brackets.
The Bad Guys don't use redundant power supplies, or battery backup.
By the way, if you want a quick overview of this kind of equipment if you've never seen it before, here's (randomly picked by Bing Shopping) China Skyline's marketing blurb for a similar 64-port SMS gateway:
* https://chinaskyline.net/sk-gsm-voip-gateway/esim-64-ports-s...
This is fascinating.
Re Shelving: I exclusively buy very similar shelving. It is cheap, reliable, large, and strong. In fact, I have not found any other shelving that can match the performance/price of these.
I buy from Walmart. search their site for "Hyper Tough wire storage shelves"
I'm seriously wondering about the practicality of this operation. Wouldn't that many SIMs on the same spot overload any nearby cell tower? And even if the antennas could stand the load, that many SIMs hugging the network without any logical reason (like a parade or a demonstration) is bound to raise alarms at the network operator HQ. If this is a scam operation, I would expect these boxes to be distributed across several locations.
It's likely a "crime-web" service host. They are probably somewhere in Manhattan or Brooklyn to have enough tower cells to handle it (tis the benefits of a dense city for this type of operation). They probably gradually grew it as their crime web demand rose and flew too close to the sun.
It also sounds like they did have multiple locations, but they didn't distribute the modems out enough to flew under the radar longer.
Actually no, overload is easily avoided even on cheap chinese 20-channel LTE base stations (aka tower segments) if all you do is just rotating SIMs and sending some SMS.
Logically one would switch sms-sending using some number of (fixed or mobile) sdr-based simboxes so that they would even appear to move around the city randomly.
Those guys did it on the cheap. But then they did not expect SS to drop on them.
It's likely they round-robin the SIMs through a much smaller number of modems
Oh! Those pics are interesting - the handful on the floor of an appartment feel very different to me from the room with hundreds of them; that's much larger scale.
Those might be photos of the equipment in storage after it was confiscated, not of the equipment in the location and condition in which it was found.