Comment by BillTthree
5 months ago
Does anyone know what crime is being investigated? It looks like the malicious activity was sending spam text messages and forwarding international phone calls. Is there a federal regulation against sending spam messages?
Is it somehow illegal to have many sim cards in the same place as having many radios?
The telco's are also capable of bringing down the network, and they are legally allowed to turn their services off. Its not government infrastructure, its a business. If the backbone ISP providers decided to turn off their services for an area for a time, thats fine, there are contractual provisions to deal with that. its not a crime.
There has been no mention of arrest, was this 'crime' perpetrated by the infamous hackerman in ablack hoodie?
In other countries these setups are fairly illegal because it bypasses the international call tariffs that the typically state owned telco company would be entitled to. A local domestic call might cost $.01 per minute and an international call $.20. They call it "bypass fraud".
But in the US, I'm not so sure since things are already deregulated.
US doesn't really have bypass fraud as a category, no; there's no real pricing difference based on the source of a call. Inbound international calls don't have to pay extra termination costs vs domestic calls and outbound international calls aren't paying much more than the cost of a local call + whatever the foreign carrier charges for termination. If you were doing bypass fraud in another country for calls to/from the US, you don't need SIM farms in the US, because you could just get a SIP account.
These boxes would be used for pricing arbitrage where a mobile phone user can get 'unlimited' calling or messaging but a bulk messaging/calling customer would have to pay something per message or minute, or to avoid customer identification or restrictions on message that would happen with a bulk account.