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.
> We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it.
Modern US variant: we will say whatever we must to amass donations to pay for the election campaign, but you'd be a fool to bet on our doing what we should once elected.
The stuff they did in this particular case is likely a violation of all laws involved, just like the other recent case with the US Secret Service in New York City. In both cases they are seizing someone's business equipment, on the assumption that because it is an unusual business and sometimes it is used for spam, the business itself is spam.
Actually, it's probably legal in the USA, but completely illegal in the EU where the Digital Services Act regulation very specifically says that a mere conduit of data transmissions cannot be held liable for data transmissions passing through it which it didn't originate. I only know anything about the law in Germany (and I am not a lawyer) so let's pretend this happened in Germany - then the business operator - presuming that they're running a relay business and not spammers themselves - would win back all the money this police action deprived them of, including lost revenue, equipment costs, lawyer fees, and repairs for any damages incurred during the raid. Their cellphone provider is probably allowed to terminate their contract however, and could sue them if they had any meaningful damages. The civil court system here is very algorithmic as far as I'm aware: if(you broke the law) you.transfer(victim, victim.money_if_you_hadnt_broken_the_law - victim.money);
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.
On the contrary, EU is notoriously hard for the rich to lobby. It is also the primary motivation behind the super rich to be against EU since they too are having trouble to find someone in EU to solve their "problems". A famous anecdote is from Rupert Murdock who is able to influence UK poltics at whim but had no effect on EU: https://www.quora.com/When-I-go-into-Downing-Street-they-do-...
He was also a huge backer of Brexit.
On social media there's persistent and years long push to paint EU as anti-Business. They are pushing and pushing for de-regulations.
The Pfizergate is another great example of what happens when you have a centralized decision. That scandal only exist because of the Covid, an unprecedented situation where EU has to take quick actions and had to engage with companies directly. The scope of the scandal is also extremely benign compared to what you have in other places, it's essentially a transparency scandal. No one is even seriously accusing her of abuse of her position for personal enrichment when in a normal country this type of scandal is often about giving the contract to a relative of theirs or an election campaign donor.
Once the Ukraine war is over, I also expect to see other scandals to be unearthed as they were rushed to acquire weapons fast.
There are scandals like Qatar paying an MPs to push their agenda, but other than that EU is so much less corrupt than anything the local governments have. Those involved in the Qatar scandal went to prison, how many local politicians you have who go to prison for anything other than political reasons?
Have you noticed what has been happening in US since February for example? That one is extreme but all over EU the local governments have some sort of these scams and dealings. In countries like US all you have to do is to buy president's crypto coins or make a donation for his election campaigns. In EU, you simply can't do anything of this sort. That's why those who want influence actually pay social media influencers to push an agenda and this is considerably more expensive and hard compared to just establishing a relationship and paying up the president.
Many of EU's weaknesses are also it's strength since having full control and being able to move fast comes with its risks.
That's why across the EU the trust in EU and support for EU is way higher than any local governments. The worst is over %50 in favor of EU, when most of the governments consider themselves lucky if they are in the %30s.
We seem to be exposed to different information on the EU.
> notorious for rich people to lobby
I don't know about rich people, but companies seem to have a lot of success in doing so.
> Murdoch backer of Brexit
This is not evidence that the EU is hard to lobby. People across the political spectrum can be anti-EU: Corbyn, who's as left and as anti-corruption as they come, was a Leaver (and a UK with Corbyn as PM would have arguably been better off outside the EU, but I digress).
> Ursula, scandal only about transparency and not personal enrichment
I don't know how awarding billions of public funds in contracts and then deleting all messages, something she's done before while working for the German gov, is "not that bad" and not about personal enrichment, but about her great care for efficiency and the European pop...
> Those involved in the Qatar scandal went to prison, how many local politicians you have who go to prison for anything other than political reasons?
You're cherry-picking, powerful EU officials are as immune to justice as anywhere else, and plenty of examples exist in Member States of people going to prison for corruption. The former president of France just started his prison sentence, you might have heard. Those cases are the exceptions that prove the rule.
> Have you noticed what has been happening in US since February for example?
Few countries would look good on corruption if you compare them to "What has been happening in the US", FULL STOP. That the EU is not as far gone as the US has been for decades (thank fuck) is, again, no evidence of anything.
I invite you to peruse ftm.eu, as I'm on my phone: look at the criticism of OLAF's selective investigations, the watchdogs lacking any independence and finding that everything's just dandy with EU officials, the revolving doors across so many industries, the bribes and gifts, the insider trading, employment of family members, mismanagement of funds, etc. etc. etc.
The corruption in EU is indeed happening through local governments(EU allocates money for projects, local governments who actually end up getting the money to execute these projects siphon that to their cronies or to spice up the local economies), as per this article and the articles in ftm.eu
This is one article that says the European Commission is not aware of 90% of EU fraud cases: at this scale, this can't be brushed off as being the fault of member states.
> and the articles in ftm.eu
No. That is not what FTM investigations show. At all.
The site is paywalled, can't check the articles but at least on of the headlines is about the local government corruption(how Orban funnels Hungary's assets to its allies).
Since EU doesn't directly deal with anything, there's not much opportunity for corruption. It's almost always down the pipeline.
People deny things all the time. He used his media in favor of UK leaving EU, which is more consistent with him not being happy with his abilities to influence EU.
Okay, I may be exaggerating a bit the European's attitudes towards their local police and governments(some small and cold countries tend to trust their local police and government more than the larger countries at sunny places) but here you can see that EU is consistency viewed more favorably than the local ones through the years:
The trust levels in Police is much lower in larger countries. In Germany it’s %50 and %35. NL is not the rule, it’s the exception.
But sure, hating the police is an exaggeration. Still, I think it’s obvious that its for illustrative purposes and not a declaration. Just like everybody never means every single person no exceptions when talking about general situations. It’s like when you say “everyone knows that the flat earth theory is BS”. Yes it’s not everybody and your mileage may vary depending on the location.
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.
What hassle? With a bit of organization there's no real hassle. My addresses are all in /etc/aliases on the mail server and have a time stamped comment in front of them naming the company / website.
I can easily take this "db" with me on my smartphone. Or could make it available with a simple interface. As we use Joplin already to share data between family members, that's the place the list of addresses lives for lookups from family members.
The benefit isn't primarily for deletion, which is a nice side effect, but to easily recognize phishing to the "wrong" email addresses. Certain deletions are done automatically for addresses where I put a timestamp in, e.g. me.dhl24c@example.com will be from the third quarter of 2024 and can be removed at the end of 2024.
Yes. BTW I still do that, but with a single address, username+myonlinebank@domain.com style. It was easier when I need to give them my email again on the phone or in other circumstances, they can see it's just the same with extra bits.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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).
The reason why SIM boxes exist, is because in many countries you cannot buy a SIM card anonymously, and because every site now wants your phone number.
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.
If websites didn't force insecure SMS 2FA, these services wouldn't be neccesary. It's like we can't have nice things anymore because criminals can't have nice things so you can't have them either.
Try entering a landline whenever you're asked a phone number for your account. They say the number is invalid, which I find insulting because I know my number very well and it's been around for longer than those websites.
And now this article insults me again by saying it's only used for criminal activities.
Per another article : Europol und Eurojust, were able to attribute to the criminal network more than 1 700 individual cyber fraud cases in Austria and 1 500 in Latvia, with a total loss of several million euros. The financial loss in Austria alone amounts to around EUR 4.5 million, as well as EUR 420 000 in Latvia.
So I guess they were providing legitimate business while doing scams at the same time.
AFAIK network operators are no longer required to know their customer, but may still choose to do so. They're required to cooperate with law enforcement investigations. This doesn't seem like "cooperation" in this case, but rather "police just barge in and take all your stuff" and they probably could win a civil case against the police to get their equipment back or its monetary value, as well as lost revenue. Europe generally has higher rule of law than USA, so there's less chance a judge could say "your business sounds shady so you don't win this case."
The recent EU-wide Digital Services Act has generous liability protections for "mere conduits". A mere conduit is anyone who is just getting traffic from A to B, unless they are A or B themselves. Even though in this case their cellphone operator may think they are originators of traffic, if they are a relay business (and not spammers themselves) then they are mere conduits and protected from liability*. Of course they must still cooperate with law enforcement to track down the source of the spam, but they are not required to pre-emptively KYC. Having their office raided and all their equipment stolen doesn't sound like "cooperating" to me.
* their cellphone company probably has the right to terminate these SIM contracts, and may also sue for damages, but I suspect the damages would be something like the difference between their actual cost of SIM cards and the EU-prescribed maximum wholesale rate for sending texts, which is likely a negative number.
The only real solution to these problems is to convert the accounts of the elderly or anyone who can't be trusted to spot scammers into joint accounts with restrictions on large transactions controlled by a trusted family member or nominee.
If someone robs a costumer inside a McDonald's do you complain when the cops that arrive and capture the thieves are paid with taxes and not by McDonald's itself?
The cops never arrive in time, possibly on purpose.
I wish places like Home Depot, ones with huge shoplifting issues, would post armed guards and deal with thieves violently and directly. HD has to be hurting right now because their prices have gone crazy and are way higher than similar stores, so you know they got hit hard by theft and are trying to pass on the cost of their own stupidity and lack of fortitude onto paying customers. No costumes needed.
CVS stores also got hit tremendously hard--many stores were completely cleaned out by thieves! They have closed hundreds of stores now. They won't directly deal with their problems either.
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.
https://www.europol.europa.eu/media-press/newsroom/news/cybe...
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.
> We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it.
Modern US variant: we will say whatever we must to amass donations to pay for the election campaign, but you'd be a fool to bet on our doing what we should once elected.
And yet the gripe I hear a lot about people in the US who voted for the current admin is that "they are doing what they said they would do."
It was priceless when Farage explained this was just a campaign slogan.
https://www.reddit.com/r/PropagandaPosters/comments/x0vicd/v...
It was intended as just an example of what one could do with all that delicious tax money.
The stuff they did in this particular case is likely a violation of all laws involved, just like the other recent case with the US Secret Service in New York City. In both cases they are seizing someone's business equipment, on the assumption that because it is an unusual business and sometimes it is used for spam, the business itself is spam.
Actually, it's probably legal in the USA, but completely illegal in the EU where the Digital Services Act regulation very specifically says that a mere conduit of data transmissions cannot be held liable for data transmissions passing through it which it didn't originate. I only know anything about the law in Germany (and I am not a lawyer) so let's pretend this happened in Germany - then the business operator - presuming that they're running a relay business and not spammers themselves - would win back all the money this police action deprived them of, including lost revenue, equipment costs, lawyer fees, and repairs for any damages incurred during the raid. Their cellphone provider is probably allowed to terminate their contract however, and could sue them if they had any meaningful damages. The civil court system here is very algorithmic as far as I'm aware: if(you broke the law) you.transfer(victim, victim.money_if_you_hadnt_broken_the_law - victim.money);
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.
https://netzpolitik.org/2022/dude-wheres-my-privacy-how-a-ho...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfizergate
https://www.ftm.eu/
On the contrary, EU is notoriously hard for the rich to lobby. It is also the primary motivation behind the super rich to be against EU since they too are having trouble to find someone in EU to solve their "problems". A famous anecdote is from Rupert Murdock who is able to influence UK poltics at whim but had no effect on EU: https://www.quora.com/When-I-go-into-Downing-Street-they-do-...
He was also a huge backer of Brexit.
On social media there's persistent and years long push to paint EU as anti-Business. They are pushing and pushing for de-regulations.
The Pfizergate is another great example of what happens when you have a centralized decision. That scandal only exist because of the Covid, an unprecedented situation where EU has to take quick actions and had to engage with companies directly. The scope of the scandal is also extremely benign compared to what you have in other places, it's essentially a transparency scandal. No one is even seriously accusing her of abuse of her position for personal enrichment when in a normal country this type of scandal is often about giving the contract to a relative of theirs or an election campaign donor.
Once the Ukraine war is over, I also expect to see other scandals to be unearthed as they were rushed to acquire weapons fast.
There are scandals like Qatar paying an MPs to push their agenda, but other than that EU is so much less corrupt than anything the local governments have. Those involved in the Qatar scandal went to prison, how many local politicians you have who go to prison for anything other than political reasons?
Have you noticed what has been happening in US since February for example? That one is extreme but all over EU the local governments have some sort of these scams and dealings. In countries like US all you have to do is to buy president's crypto coins or make a donation for his election campaigns. In EU, you simply can't do anything of this sort. That's why those who want influence actually pay social media influencers to push an agenda and this is considerably more expensive and hard compared to just establishing a relationship and paying up the president.
Many of EU's weaknesses are also it's strength since having full control and being able to move fast comes with its risks.
That's why across the EU the trust in EU and support for EU is way higher than any local governments. The worst is over %50 in favor of EU, when most of the governments consider themselves lucky if they are in the %30s.
We seem to be exposed to different information on the EU.
> notorious for rich people to lobby
I don't know about rich people, but companies seem to have a lot of success in doing so.
> Murdoch backer of Brexit
This is not evidence that the EU is hard to lobby. People across the political spectrum can be anti-EU: Corbyn, who's as left and as anti-corruption as they come, was a Leaver (and a UK with Corbyn as PM would have arguably been better off outside the EU, but I digress).
> Ursula, scandal only about transparency and not personal enrichment
I don't know how awarding billions of public funds in contracts and then deleting all messages, something she's done before while working for the German gov, is "not that bad" and not about personal enrichment, but about her great care for efficiency and the European pop...
> Those involved in the Qatar scandal went to prison, how many local politicians you have who go to prison for anything other than political reasons?
You're cherry-picking, powerful EU officials are as immune to justice as anywhere else, and plenty of examples exist in Member States of people going to prison for corruption. The former president of France just started his prison sentence, you might have heard. Those cases are the exceptions that prove the rule.
> Have you noticed what has been happening in US since February for example?
Few countries would look good on corruption if you compare them to "What has been happening in the US", FULL STOP. That the EU is not as far gone as the US has been for decades (thank fuck) is, again, no evidence of anything.
I invite you to peruse ftm.eu, as I'm on my phone: look at the criticism of OLAF's selective investigations, the watchdogs lacking any independence and finding that everything's just dandy with EU officials, the revolving doors across so many industries, the bribes and gifts, the insider trading, employment of family members, mismanagement of funds, etc. etc. etc.
One article that I enjoyed is this:
https://archive.is/YieBg
Edited to address more of your points.
> One article that I enjoyed is this: https://archive.is/YieBg
The corruption in EU is indeed happening through local governments(EU allocates money for projects, local governments who actually end up getting the money to execute these projects siphon that to their cronies or to spice up the local economies), as per this article and the articles in ftm.eu
> as per this article
This is one article that says the European Commission is not aware of 90% of EU fraud cases: at this scale, this can't be brushed off as being the fault of member states.
> and the articles in ftm.eu
No. That is not what FTM investigations show. At all.
The site is paywalled, can't check the articles but at least on of the headlines is about the local government corruption(how Orban funnels Hungary's assets to its allies).
Since EU doesn't directly deal with anything, there's not much opportunity for corruption. It's almost always down the pipeline.
> A famous anecdote is from Rupert Murdock who is able to influence UK poltics at whim but had no effect on EU:
Is it though?
> There is much fake news published about me, but let me make clear that I have never uttered those words
https://pressgazette.co.uk/publishers/nationals/rupert-murdo...
I buy the rest of your comment that EU may be better than local govts.
People deny things all the time. He used his media in favor of UK leaving EU, which is more consistent with him not being happy with his abilities to influence EU.
> EU is notoriously hard for the rich to lobby.
Yes, the rich are lobbying the EU hard. /s
> when its a "Euro" thing it feels much better.
A sense of unity builds optimism, especially in very troubled times.
> In every country in Europe people are pissed with their government and hate the police
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
Okay, I may be exaggerating a bit the European's attitudes towards their local police and governments(some small and cold countries tend to trust their local police and government more than the larger countries at sunny places) but here you can see that EU is consistency viewed more favorably than the local ones through the years:
https://europa.eu/eurobarometer/surveys/detail/3372
Maybe edit and clarify your misinformation that Europeans hate the police? We don't.
The trust levels in Police is much lower in larger countries. In Germany it’s %50 and %35. NL is not the rule, it’s the exception.
But sure, hating the police is an exaggeration. Still, I think it’s obvious that its for illustrative purposes and not a declaration. Just like everybody never means every single person no exceptions when talking about general situations. It’s like when you say “everyone knows that the flat earth theory is BS”. Yes it’s not everybody and your mileage may vary depending on the location.
> In every country in Europe people are pissed with their government and hate the police
those exist, never met any luckily, guess I hang in positive circles.
In my mind "euro cops" holds overtones of some a late-90s track-suit-and-nike shoes, bald shaven gabber rave robocop-from-amsterdam pastiche
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/
Glad I'm not the only one. Euro Cops!
International police appear to be targeting these massive sim-dependent fraud/scam operations. Probably not difficult to track these hot spots.
> 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.
What hassle? With a bit of organization there's no real hassle. My addresses are all in /etc/aliases on the mail server and have a time stamped comment in front of them naming the company / website.
I can easily take this "db" with me on my smartphone. Or could make it available with a simple interface. As we use Joplin already to share data between family members, that's the place the list of addresses lives for lookups from family members.
The benefit isn't primarily for deletion, which is a nice side effect, but to easily recognize phishing to the "wrong" email addresses. Certain deletions are done automatically for addresses where I put a timestamp in, e.g. me.dhl24c@example.com will be from the third quarter of 2024 and can be removed at the end of 2024.
> What hassle?
You made my point better than I could with the rest of your post.
I personally like the idea that my bank account has a completely different email and password then any other account.
In theory, criminals don't know where to even try to exploit/phish.
Yes. BTW I still do that, but with a single address, username+myonlinebank@domain.com style. It was easier when I need to give them my email again on the phone or in other circumstances, they can see it's just the same with extra bits.
I tried this route at first. There are enough stupid forms that reject VERP addresses that it's easier to just use different recipients.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Did you miss the part of the article where it stated the group was in Latvia and not in an Asian country?
> In the raid, authorities seized 1200 SIM boxes, with the devices containing 40,000 active SIM cards
Realistically, wouldn't that look suspicious to a cell tower if 40k sims log in from one location?
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)
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.
they can know your inner monologue, thoughts precisely
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.
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).
Considering how enriched we are with mobile devices you'd probably already have hundred of thousands logging in from one location.
No, the denser the area the more radio towers there are making precision better.
There are much more tech photos in local news media:
https://rus.delfi.lv/57863/criminal/120091647/foto-video-v-h...
The reason why SIM boxes exist, is because in many countries you cannot buy a SIM card anonymously, and because every site now wants your phone number.
I wonder what people used to do with these fake 41M accounts. I suspect alot for influencing conversations online.
“Euro Cop” sounds like Jean-Claude Van Damme movie.
Except Van Damme is no cop.
https://www.euronews.com/culture/2025/04/03/jean-claude-van-...
I wish one day INTERPOL would share a list of those fake accounts instead of vehicle photos.
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.
Requiring a user to use cryptocurrency sounds like a great way to not have a lot of users.
Mass SMS is illegal on the part of the sender, not any intermediary services. Anti-anti-bot is a good thing since anti-bot is destroying the internet.
If websites didn't force insecure SMS 2FA, these services wouldn't be neccesary. It's like we can't have nice things anymore because criminals can't have nice things so you can't have them either.
Try entering a landline whenever you're asked a phone number for your account. They say the number is invalid, which I find insulting because I know my number very well and it's been around for longer than those websites.
And now this article insults me again by saying it's only used for criminal activities.
The gall.
Dead Internet Theory
I misinterpreted the title and thought the cops used 49M fake accounts to take down the network
Yep, I did as well. And visited the site to see how cops used fake accounts...
So... Clickbait title? ;-)
This is a legitimate service also used by privacy minded individuals - just like the recent similar raid in the USA. What's the actual crime here?
It's usually the illegitimate use cases that cause problem. According to the article the problem was that they were used for scams.
Per another article : Europol und Eurojust, were able to attribute to the criminal network more than 1 700 individual cyber fraud cases in Austria and 1 500 in Latvia, with a total loss of several million euros. The financial loss in Austria alone amounts to around EUR 4.5 million, as well as EUR 420 000 in Latvia.
So I guess they were providing legitimate business while doing scams at the same time.
The fact that it was run by actual organized crime group using the SIMs to commit crimes in masse. Article lays it out quite clearly.
Network operators have a right to know who is using their pipes.
This is not about individual network operators making the choice by themselves, rather they are many times compelled to do so by law.
This is partucularly problematic when it comes to mobile services as they allow people to be tracked.
AFAIK network operators are no longer required to know their customer, but may still choose to do so. They're required to cooperate with law enforcement investigations. This doesn't seem like "cooperation" in this case, but rather "police just barge in and take all your stuff" and they probably could win a civil case against the police to get their equipment back or its monetary value, as well as lost revenue. Europe generally has higher rule of law than USA, so there's less chance a judge could say "your business sounds shady so you don't win this case."
The recent EU-wide Digital Services Act has generous liability protections for "mere conduits". A mere conduit is anyone who is just getting traffic from A to B, unless they are A or B themselves. Even though in this case their cellphone operator may think they are originators of traffic, if they are a relay business (and not spammers themselves) then they are mere conduits and protected from liability*. Of course they must still cooperate with law enforcement to track down the source of the spam, but they are not required to pre-emptively KYC. Having their office raided and all their equipment stolen doesn't sound like "cooperating" to me.
* their cellphone company probably has the right to terminate these SIM contracts, and may also sue for damages, but I suspect the damages would be something like the difference between their actual cost of SIM cards and the EU-prescribed maximum wholesale rate for sending texts, which is likely a negative number.
Is 49M a lot?
why are taxes being used to moderate Facebook?
When your mom or grandma gets swindled out of her retirement, this will start making sense.
The only real solution to these problems is to convert the accounts of the elderly or anyone who can't be trusted to spot scammers into joint accounts with restrictions on large transactions controlled by a trusted family member or nominee.
Other solution would be to restrict international calls though.
If someone robs a costumer inside a McDonald's do you complain when the cops that arrive and capture the thieves are paid with taxes and not by McDonald's itself?
If you can't afford to buy a costume, just wear your nicest regular outfit. Fancy dress is not worth jail time.
The cops never arrive in time, possibly on purpose.
I wish places like Home Depot, ones with huge shoplifting issues, would post armed guards and deal with thieves violently and directly. HD has to be hurting right now because their prices have gone crazy and are way higher than similar stores, so you know they got hit hard by theft and are trying to pass on the cost of their own stupidity and lack of fortitude onto paying customers. No costumes needed.
CVS stores also got hit tremendously hard--many stores were completely cleaned out by thieves! They have closed hundreds of stores now. They won't directly deal with their problems either.
Taxes are used to take down a large criminal network using fake social media accounts.