I'm a little surprised that a behavioral analysis didn't flag these anyway. Probably did, just the networks don't care as long as they get their cut.
Use VPNs? Surely paying for some subscriptions at $3/month is cheaper than renting an apartment in manhattan?
disclosure: I'm an investor/advisor in massive.
Pretty clear this is the case, almost all of it could be stopped overnight with a simple whitelist to people you know and a blocklist of countries and regions where you’ll never ever need to take a call from.
What about sending spam and threads over one of these SIMs? I'm pretty sure that warrants legal action.
Just tell people that this is the sort of setup that is used by (overseas) scammers to send messages to thousands of potential victims at a time to rope them into various scams.
Fighting scammers is a hugely popular thing with the general public. No need to dress it up with that U.N. nonsense to get the general public's approval. People wouldn't even have minded that the Secret Service ended up uncovering a scammer support operation whilst tracking down something else.
Yeah makes a lot of sense when framed like this, the timing of the secret service of all people busting this 'huge' operation was far too suspicious.
`site:nytimes.com “speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation”` has no earlier results
Other outlets have used “speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation” before though.
It could be just a scam bot farm but a scam bot farm with the intention of targeting vulnerable UN delegates with scams not necessarily to disrupt any cell tower?
I don't mean this in derogatory sense. I wasslightly...hm...confused when reading this. When I see something in the news, to the degree that I trust the source, I see it only as a statement of fact, and unless I trust the commentator, I ignore the comment. I only expect descriptive accuracy from the news. This sometimes requires certain things that individuals don't have.
When I read a personal blog article articulating a personal opinion, presenting evidence and trying to make a case for their conclusion, I usually apply a different standard. From them, I expect sound _reasoning_. And I can't say that this article is structured as a sequence of QED, so to speak. It doesn't seem like the conclusions follow from the premisses. That's not to say is wrong, just that if it is wring, it would be in part by accident.
No, they put this in lower manhattan because of the cell density there. It makes the fraud harder to detect in all the noise of normal usage.
Edit:ascii emoji fail
The real question here is who and what it was intended to warn off, and you'll never get a real answer to that.
JdeBP•1h ago