What a bizarre story. They say it's an anonymous network. What does that mean when multiple locations with racks of tens of thousands of SIM cards and the supporting equipment are found around NYC area? In order to manage this hardware and the operations around this equipment it would take boots on the ground, at least occasionally, for repairs and maintenance.

No mention of arrests or surveillance of any site to try and apprehend anyone related.

ICE is probably all "we want our stuff back!!!"

I'm curious how this would work without being traced. Someone is paying rent on the apartments. For the simcards, I think they are all able to call 911 even if they don't have credit/dataplan. They're also able to connect to a tower and take up slots. So probably the only way to financially trace the simcards is the initial purchase.

So that's the tip. Makes you really wonder about the iceberg, this raises many more questions than it answers.

The UK has criminalized possessing or using SIM farms or related gear in response to these popping up with some regularity. But the operators are pretty clever and know how to hide. I've been thinking about how easy it would be to detect these when you're a telco and I think the signature is unique enough that it should be possible to detect which SIMs are part of a farm, even if you don't know the exact location of the farm.

> Officials said the anonymous communications network, which included more than 100,000 SIM cards and 300 servers, could interfere with emergency response services and could be used to conduct encrypted communication. One official said the network was capable of sending 30 million text messages per minute, anonymously. The official said the agency had never before seen such an extensive operation.

> Investigators found the SIM cards and servers in August at several locations within a 35-mile radius of the United Nations headquarters. The discovery followed a monthslong investigation into what the agency described as anonymous “telephonic threats” made to three high-level U.S. government officials this spring — one official in the Secret Service and two who work at the White House, one of the officials said.

So 100k SIM cards scattered around the middle of New York City.

Probably an egress point for scammers and bot farms, and the speculation about local disruptions isn't grounded in anything other than scale?

Is there a less clickbait-y source? There's no tangible link to the United Nations described in the article; that seems to be a gratuitous flourish.

> "several locations within a 35-mile radius of the United Nations headquarters"

That's the entire of New York City!

edit to add: This very weird part was actually lifted from the SS press release,

> "These devices were concentrated within 35 miles of the global meeting of the United Nations General Assembly now underway in New York City."

https://www.secretservice.gov/newsroom/releases/2025/09/us-s... ("U.S. Secret Service dismantles imminent telecommunications threat in New York tristate area")

Oh lol, this is a scam site. Yes, there are potential other uses for a sim box but mostly they are used for VoIP purposes. It's honestly so hard reading quotes from the US government these days. Cartels, drugs, guns. They make it sound like they interrupted the staging of an assault on the UN when the article actually says that the locations were within 35 miles of the UN headquarters in NYC. This is a significant distance as it covers beyond the 5 boroughs, it's the "tri state area". Like 20M people live in that circle. I highly doubt this is for anything other than VoIP scams.