Europol on Friday announced the disruption of a sophisticated cybercrime-as-a-service (CaaS) platform that operated a SIM farm and enabled its clients to carry out a wide spectrum of crimes ranging from phishing to investment fraud.
A coordinated law enforcement effort called Operation SIMCARTEL conducted 26 searches, resulting in the arrest of seven suspects and the seizure of 1,200 SIM box devices containing 40,000 active SIM cards. Five of those detained are Latvian citizens.
Additionally, five servers were destroyed and two websites were hacked.[.]com and episim[.]com) The ad service was taken down on October 10, 2025 for displaying a seizure banner. Separately, four luxury vehicles were seized, and €431,000 ($502,000) in the suspects’ bank accounts and €266,000 ($310,000) in their cryptocurrency accounts were frozen.
Countries participating in the operation included authorities from Austria, Estonia, Finland and Latvia, in cooperation with Europol and Eurojust.
According to Europol, the criminal network has been held responsible for more than 1,700 individual cyber fraud cases in Austria and 1,500 in Latvia, causing total losses of €4.5 million ($5.25 million) and €420,000 ($489,000) in the two countries, respectively.
“The criminal network and its infrastructure were highly sophisticated technologically and enabled criminals around the world to use this SIM-box service to commit telecommunications-related cyber crimes as well as a wide range of other crimes,” the agency said.
The infrastructure offered registered telephone numbers to people from more than 80 countries for use in criminal activities, including setting up fake accounts on social media and communications platforms with the primary goal of obscuring their original identity and location. In total, the service enabled the creation of more than 49 million online accounts.
These accounts were then used to carry out phishing and smishing attacks and commit financial fraud by tricking victims into investing their funds in fraudulent trading schemes. Another contacted him on WhatsApp, posing as his daughter or son, claiming that he now had a new number and asking him to transfer money in the four-digit range for emergencies.
Some of the other crimes made possible through the platform include extortion, migrant smuggling and distribution of child sexual abuse material (CSAM).
According to a snapshot captured on the Internet Archive, GoGetSMS was marketed as a way to get a “fast and secure temporary phone number”, with over 10 million numbers available and receive verification codes from over 160 online services.
On its website, GoGetSMS also offered the ability to monetize existing SIM cards by turning them into “powerful assets to generate passive income” using its “special software”, allowing card owners to earn revenue for every SMS message sent to them.
On review website Trustpilot, paying users have reported facing problems receiving a temporary number through GoGetSMS, with one user claiming that they paid for a US number on the platform and did not receive a working number in return. The user said, “Tried multiple times, wasted both time and money. Support is completely unresponsive – no help, no refund, nothing.”
Latvian State Police said in a coordinated announcement that the platform was designed for anonymous communications and payments, affecting 3,200 people in different countries.
