I don't think this comment will contribute much, so please forgive that, but calling a "Collaboration between Europol and the Shadowserver Foundation" for "Euro cops" is probably the most Australian thing I've ever seen on the entire internet.
I enjoyed the title more that I want to admit TBH :)
In every country in Europe people are pissed with their government and hate the police but when its a "Euro" thing it feels much better.
The online narrative may make you think that "Europe" is a dirty word(chat control, cookie banner, regulations, fines etc), but its actually much more pure than any local politics and much much less divisive. The "Euro cops" phrase gives me the feeling of bunch of police officers that are not particularly fun at parties but are definitely not corrupt.
This reminded me of something Jean-Claude Juncker once said about democracy in the EU:
> We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it.
Being a step removed from local politics means they can do stuff without the immediate fear they're all kicked out, but the other downside of people not really caring who they elect is it's relatively easy to be elected on a "We hate the EU" line. It's a weird place.
The EU has its advantages, but I'd never list "more pure" and "not corrupt" among them. The EU introduced lobbying (=legal corruption) into European politics when most countries historically didn't have much of it. It also has a massive amount of normal, God-fearing illegal corruption.
Many of the biggest stories about the EU are about or have a sizable aspect of corruption. Chat Control amd Thorn, Ursula von der Leyen and Big Pharma, Ursula von der Leyen and $anything.
Follow the Money is a thriving investigative journalism publication that lives off uncovering corruption in the EU.
I mean your version is much more entertaining, but there was a TV series (1988-1992) that was actually called Eurocops.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094456/
> The coordinated takedown, codenamed Operation SIMCARTEL, took place on October 10 in Latvia, as part of a joint investigation by police in the Baltic nation, Austria, Estonia and Finland.
Not the best way to see my country in the news, but oh well.
That said, I wish I could reasonably do something similar to what's possible with e-mails: where you can have one mailbox per account/company you want to do interaction with, like aliexpress@mydomain.com, paypal@mydomain.com, banking@mydomain.com and so on. I'd like to have one phone number per company or whatever that I have to interact with, so that if they sell my data to third parties and I suddenly start getting advertisement/spam calls, I can figure out exactly who was acting badly.
Honest question, how well does it go for for email ?
I did that pretty seriously for a while, and in my case I feel it led to nothing specific. I'd get spam from weird places and shut the address, but that would actually amount to an extremely small amount of the total spam I was getting.
Also my ISP or the phone company was selling away my email and there was no way I'd just block them, nor would they give a shit about my bitching to their customer support.
Yea, same feeling here. I did that for a while but in the end I maybe went ahead and blocked one address in over 10 years of doing that. It was more of a hassle than it was worth, especially if you want to do password resets and you have to dig up that email again vs. just typing your default one.
The advantage isn't necessarily about blocking addresses but them not being able to be correlated. Nowadays every product sends your email to ad providers (Facebook, etc), sometimes in hashed form. Using unique addresses per company defeats such tracking.
Similarly they also do it with the phone number, which is also why the techbros hate these SIM farms so much.
Spam is so easy to identify I don't bother. I can tell a message is spam from the subjectline + sender I would say almost 100% of the time. Those messages get deleted unread.
If you give your real email, almost every service starts spamming you - they think that annoying people is a "growth hack". Use temporary email whenever possible.
I bet it looks better in their books to have 40K paying customers more than not having those, so they just ignore it as long as not causing more problems than they are worth it. My guess is that the telcos were making half a million euros a month from these.
Can they know the SIM location precisely? I believe they can only triangulate multiple towers to determine a radius. If they could pinpoint a specific, narrow location, it'd be easier to spot unusual concentration.
Depends. They found one of these in New York but it’s very easy for 10s of thousands onto gather in a relatively small area. For example, New Year’s Eve, sports/concert at msg, regular foot traffic at Times Square, etc. so I think barring even antennas shenanigans, disguising it could be not impossible.
(I also understand they rarely use all active SIMs at the same time but instead rotate through in order to avoid arousing suspicion)
> but instead rotate through in order to avoid arousing suspicion
Also to use fewer resources! Compared to the SIM cards, the radio/modems are expensive. It's cheaper to reuse one radio/modem cycling through different SIM cards for just long enough to receive pending SMSes. But not too many, or you increase latency. It's probably more suspicious to have the same modems cycling through SIM cards than to have all of them always connected.
If they mostly received inbound traffic, the carrier actually gets paid for it, so may not have any incentive to stop this. Carriers generally only care when SIM farms place outgoing traffic (it allows them to use cheap/free consumer plans instead of expensive SMS providers).
It's not impossible that they have directional antennas pointed at different towers nearby-ish, if you do directional antennas the triangulation thing kinda fails.
Just speculation though, it's more likely they just paid the right people off.
That's probably the cause why I cannot get an Australian phone number nor data plan for my month long business visit here.
3 different prepaid SIM's cannot get registered with my foreign Austrian passport. Roaming is way too expensive here. Telstra support tells me to call their free support number, nice catch 22. I cannot use my phone, only hotel, company or free wifi. There is no free wifi, because hackers. Telstra website sends my password to my new phone number via SMS, which is not yet activated. Catch 22. Or they just claim unknown error. I've tried all providers.
Telstra customer service gives me a date for a personal visit (so I can actually get my password to finish registration), but then at the date there is no appointment alotted. I got another date, but then my month long visit will be already over.
Every 14 year old Asian kid tries to hack into everything here. If access cards, wifi or web pages. It's the wild east here.
These burner phone numbers not exclusively used by criminals, a privacy-minded person would use those to make accounts on services that require a phone number (and sadly, it feels like there's a lot of these lately)
If you look at these companies it's never aimed at the privacy enthusiast use case. They are aiming for mass-sms outreach, anti-bot measures and sell them in bundles of 1000s.
Instead of requiring a phone number, accept a small amount ($1-2) in cryptocurrency. You can charge extra if the user sends too many DMs or gives too many likes. Perfect solution against spammers.
However, personal information costs much more than $2, so the companies will continue to demand a phone number. Mobile OS developers even developed a format for automatically transferring SMS OTP to a website to help scammy companies.
Readit News
https://www.europol.europa.eu/media-press/newsroom/news/cybe...
In every country in Europe people are pissed with their government and hate the police but when its a "Euro" thing it feels much better.
The online narrative may make you think that "Europe" is a dirty word(chat control, cookie banner, regulations, fines etc), but its actually much more pure than any local politics and much much less divisive. The "Euro cops" phrase gives me the feeling of bunch of police officers that are not particularly fun at parties but are definitely not corrupt.
> We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it.
Being a step removed from local politics means they can do stuff without the immediate fear they're all kicked out, but the other downside of people not really caring who they elect is it's relatively easy to be elected on a "We hate the EU" line. It's a weird place.
Many of the biggest stories about the EU are about or have a sizable aspect of corruption. Chat Control amd Thorn, Ursula von der Leyen and Big Pharma, Ursula von der Leyen and $anything.
Follow the Money is a thriving investigative journalism publication that lives off uncovering corruption in the EU.
https://netzpolitik.org/2022/dude-wheres-my-privacy-how-a-ho...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfizergate
https://www.ftm.eu/
Objectively false [1]. Europe is pissed at government (~30% approval) and love the police (70% approval). Hating on police is an US thing exclusively.
1: https://opendata.cbs.nl/#/CBS/nl/dataset/80518ned/table
those exist, never met any luckily, guess I hang in positive circles.
A sense of unity builds optimism, especially in very troubled times.
Not the best way to see my country in the news, but oh well.
That said, I wish I could reasonably do something similar to what's possible with e-mails: where you can have one mailbox per account/company you want to do interaction with, like aliexpress@mydomain.com, paypal@mydomain.com, banking@mydomain.com and so on. I'd like to have one phone number per company or whatever that I have to interact with, so that if they sell my data to third parties and I suddenly start getting advertisement/spam calls, I can figure out exactly who was acting badly.
I did that pretty seriously for a while, and in my case I feel it led to nothing specific. I'd get spam from weird places and shut the address, but that would actually amount to an extremely small amount of the total spam I was getting.
Also my ISP or the phone company was selling away my email and there was no way I'd just block them, nor would they give a shit about my bitching to their customer support.
In theory, criminals don't know where to even try to exploit/phish.
Similarly they also do it with the phone number, which is also why the techbros hate these SIM farms so much.
https://rus.delfi.lv/57863/criminal/120091647/foto-video-v-h...
Realistically, wouldn't that look suspicious to a cell tower if 40k sims log in from one location?
(I also understand they rarely use all active SIMs at the same time but instead rotate through in order to avoid arousing suspicion)
Also to use fewer resources! Compared to the SIM cards, the radio/modems are expensive. It's cheaper to reuse one radio/modem cycling through different SIM cards for just long enough to receive pending SMSes. But not too many, or you increase latency. It's probably more suspicious to have the same modems cycling through SIM cards than to have all of them always connected.
Just speculation though, it's more likely they just paid the right people off.
https://www.euronews.com/culture/2025/04/03/jean-claude-van-...
3 different prepaid SIM's cannot get registered with my foreign Austrian passport. Roaming is way too expensive here. Telstra support tells me to call their free support number, nice catch 22. I cannot use my phone, only hotel, company or free wifi. There is no free wifi, because hackers. Telstra website sends my password to my new phone number via SMS, which is not yet activated. Catch 22. Or they just claim unknown error. I've tried all providers.
Telstra customer service gives me a date for a personal visit (so I can actually get my password to finish registration), but then at the date there is no appointment alotted. I got another date, but then my month long visit will be already over.
Every 14 year old Asian kid tries to hack into everything here. If access cards, wifi or web pages. It's the wild east here.
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However, personal information costs much more than $2, so the companies will continue to demand a phone number. Mobile OS developers even developed a format for automatically transferring SMS OTP to a website to help scammy companies.
Deleted Comment