Secret Service Dubiously Claims, Without Evidence, To Have Uncovered ‘Hidden Telecom Network’ That Could Have Crippled NYC, UN
from the very-very-scary dept
The Secret Service says it has uncovered what it’s calling “a network of electronic devices located throughout the New York Tri-state area that were used to conduct multiple telecommunications-related threats directed towards senior U.S. government officials.” The news was announced, in part, over at the right wing propaganda website run by an overt white supremacist billionaire:
There are, however, some red flags that this is being over-hyped for attention and effect. Including a lot of completely unsupported language about what this tech “could be” used for.
In its press release, the Secret Service claims to have discovered around 300 co-located SIM servers and 100,000 SIM cards across multiple sites. The press release makes some vague hints of the networks having connections to known nation state actors:
“While forensic examination of these devices is ongoing, early analysis indicates cellular communications between nation-state threat actors and individuals that are known to federal law enforcement.”
I strongly suspect they stumbled into some mob-connected scam ring or textbot farm, and are over-hyping this for dramatic effect. The announcement is super vague, and while the Secret Service claims this network could have been used to disrupt communications ahead of an upcoming General Assembly UN meeting, there’s no evidence of that, and a lot of the hardware was collected over a 35 mile range:
“These devices were concentrated within 35 miles of the global meeting of the United Nations General Assembly now underway in New York City. Given the timing, location and potential for significant disruption to New York telecommunications posed by these devices, the agency moved quickly to disrupt this network.”
There are a lot of things within 35 miles of the UN, including a plethora of Dunkin’ Donut locations.
While this all sounds scary, it seems extremely unlikely that this collection of 100,000 SIM cards in use over this broad of an area could have ever meaningfully impacted cellular communications in New York City, which sees between nine and twelve million cellular users every day.
The mainstream headline coverage of the find (which again, included no supporting evidence of any kind that NYC was at actual, serious risk), were all appropriately hyperbolic, treating the threat to the UN and NYC itself as some sort of proven. None bothered to ask questions of any network engineers, or point out that the Secret Service provided literally zero supporting evidence for its bolder claims:
Cops routinely lie, and our consolidated corporate mainstream journalism genuinely sucks at pointing that out. But there’s also ongoing evidence of normalcy bias, wherein the press seemingly forgets that the U.S. government has also now been taken over by radical authoritarian zealots who have absolutely zero reservations about lying about everything, constantly.
Filed Under: fraud, scammers, scams, secret service, sim cards, telecom
Comments on “Secret Service Dubiously Claims, Without Evidence, To Have Uncovered ‘Hidden Telecom Network’ That Could Have Crippled NYC, UN”
There is also some claims about all theses devices costing millions (CBS News). Maybe, but certainly not second-hand.
It could send 30M texts per minute, which doesn’t look very much, and could jammed 911 (as suggested by AP), but I don’t think UN General Assembly relies on emergency lines.
So, is that enough for the US War Lord to declare NY as a criminal hell that needs constant National Guards and Marines presence? Sadly, yes, it may be enough.
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They have yet to need a reason….
I thought that was highly overwrought. At most those SIMs could DDOS the local cell towers. SSS must think we are all dolts.
On the flip side, wondering if setups like this are why all the loan scam calls I get come from New York area codes!
Someone is going to seriously blame this as the cause of the stopped escalator at the UN.
Oh, come on
… as are you. What they discovered is the normal operation of scam communication services. Those services are sold on the open market. Talking about the “mob” makes it sound a lot more romantic than it is. There is no “mob”, just a bunch of fly-by-night VOIP and SMS operators.
Actually, 100,000 SIMs could probably have run an effective denial of service attack. Those nine to twelve million users don’t make new calls constantly at machine speeds.
However, as you point out, that’s not why they were there. They were there to try to con people out of money, not shut down the damned UN. There were so many of them because the people running them know that if you funnel too many calls through one subscription, it’s going to get noticed and cut off. Apparently the SS has lost all competence, much like the rest of the Trump administration.
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Even then, “could” is doing a lot of work. Kitchens within 35 miles of the U.N. contain over 3 million devices that could be used to stab U.N. delegates.
I wonder if it’s what’s left of Aereo…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aereo
“secret service discovers laptops, which could be used for hacking the pentagon, ddosing amazon, or trafficking children!”
Ya know what is in 35 miles of the un building? The entirety of new york city of almost 8 million people. And that isn’t even accounting for New Jersey where that range stretches to Newark.
Also.. why is the secret service involved at all? Sounds more like regular law enforcement found a bot farm, sim swapping farm, or the like, and then since trump was around the secret service got involved to do some pr.
The scammers/spammers behind the equipment seeing dumbass fascist law enforcement lying to earn credits and letting out a sight of relief they will never be arrested.
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knowing they’ll never be arrested*
Remember Cambridge analytica?
This sounds more like a vast network aimed at promoting someone’s propaganda, or perhaps promoting division in society, using posts on the big, now unmoderated, social media sites.
Where are the arrests? Were these farms in abandoned buildings? It’s strange that they would announce this and not have someone in custody. Maybe it’s just crappy reporting, but I haven’t seen anything about the perpetrators. It was supposedly found in a rented space. Who rented it and why no word on that? Again, weird.
Re: You don't arrest
Members of the NSA or CIA
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OK, I give up. What, exactly, do you think the NSA or the CIA would be doing with a bunch of SIM farms in New York City? Do you actually have any idea at all?
Because it’s really obvious what the boring old scammers who run all the other SIM farms in the world would be doing with SIM farms in New York City.
I agree it’s probably a garden-variety scam operation. A telecomm DoS or something wouldn’t require that many unique cel-phone numbers. The scam texts and calls I get, OTOH, do require large volumes of burner numbers to work. Maybe a spam-posting mill originating all the social-media spam and AI slop we see every day. But not an attack on the UN.
Oh please
I think the FBI and the Secret Service busted an NSA or CIA setup. And just like the Trumpy version of the three-letter groups, someone decided to trumpet it as a massive stop of a nefarious nation-state before asking around.
We have met the nation state, and it is us.
Geo location of devices - silly claim
This has almost nothing to do with NYC or the UN.
Two most likely uses are DDOS or scam. For DDOS, it would need to focus on the very close network proximity antennae and POP locations. Nation state style attack.
If it’s burner SIMs for spam/scam messages, then location really doesn’t matter. In fact they are trying NOT to DDOS the network. The location would likely have to do with local crime and access to SIMs. This has direct $$$ creation and most likely linked to some crime syndicate instead of a nation state.
You know what else is in a 35-mile radius around NYC and the UN? Millions of actual cellphones and other cell dependent devices. For all we know, they raided Trump tower’s lost and found.
Occam and Hanlon are still bushy-faced
Since it’s technical, I’ll weigh in.
None of this is real.
The USSS SAIC “Mccool” putting out a YT video is hilarious. Less than 3 minutes and less than 3 facts.
The “servers” are consumer level looking WiFi routers and depending on the picture are either on a wood floor in an apartment, a food-storage rack with foot-high shelves, but certainly not real “servers” in any real high-density configuration. There also don’t appear to be 300+ of them.
SIM cards [sic] aren’t used by anyone other than consumers. Black hats use eSIMs because the codes can be swapped instantly, not by having grubby hands chuck out an old SIM, put in a new SIM, and waiting for hardware detection. Even generously assuming 5 seconds a SIM, 100,000 such swaps would take 140 hours. Absurd to even consider.
35 miles is beyond cell tower range even on flat land, let alone a city environs. It’s absurd to suggest that 4,000 square miles of area was searched by the USSS or that it takes that kind of area to initiate an attack.
Conceivably a limited DDoS attack is possible, but cell network authentication would immediately fail to pass messages from the 100K SIMs.
There are many other technical issues, but this is a non-started. It’s not something “Russia, Israel, or China” would do and the Mafia is not into DDoS. Nobody was arrested in this op that HAPPENED OVER A MONTH AGO and the USSS (which is involved why?) has no suspects, no arrests, and no clue. That last part seems to be part of their Trump MO – no clue – no methods – and everyone who knew how to do things has been retired.
Ask yourself – when has the USSS put out a YT video “detailing” an investigation where they accomplished NOTHING until this? Who thinks cellphones work 35 miles away or that “the cellular telephone network” (like there’s only one) can’t survive false auth attempts?
This is more BS from the same people who wrote “Anti-ICE” in crayon on some ammo, and video game memes to pretend a WWI 30.06 can make an incision entry would and no exit would on a neck from 200 yards.
I’m a tech guy so the tech stuff above is what I would be confident swearing to under oath as an expert witness. The rest is my personal thoughts on how investigations of large (4000sq miles, 100,000 SIMs, and zero suspects, and YT video plus select pictures of clearly NOT a server farm) should go.
Draw your own conclusions. This is too stupid to be real, and yet “they” expect everyone to lap it up — hence the PR tour on YT and social media.
Where’s the court filing for this AUGUST “investigation”?
Too busy photoshopping more memes on the servers maybe?
E
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Um, no, those antennas are for LTE or 5G radios. No WiFi involved. Looks like the sort of equipment that gets designed and fabbed in a month in Shenzhen.
Of course not. They don’t need that. They’re just relaying calls and/or SMS messages from the Internet.
I think they arrived at “35 miles” by drawing a circle centered at the UN to include all the equipment they found. Nothing to do with radio range.
The underlying connection to the UN is, of course, a total figment of their imagination.
Why would you think they wouldn’t pass authentication? They probably have (had) about 100,000 actual subscriptions (yes on eSIMs), bought from shady and/or careless MVNOs (or created by setting up their own shady MVNOs).
If they wanted to run a DoS (which of course they had no intention of doing), the way to do it would be to knock over the more centralized elements of the switching system. Sudden onslaught of apparently unrelated “legitimate” calls.
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As an amateur radio operator for 40 years I assure you there’s no way that those antennas in close proximity can be effective. Those are commodity WiFi MIMO routers with “extra antennas” added in via photo editing. I’d love to blame Chinese “engineering” but this is US government photoshop/gimp.
The 35 mile thing is a wild guess as they made that number up and haven’t explained the method or the data.
Servers don’t consume resources by “making calls.” They tie up the common (SMS CCS) which is server heavy and client light. Unlike RCS there’s no ack required, expected, nor given, so other than DDoS there’s no incentive for the victims [UN delegates, no really, seriously] to keep their receivers on.
Occam’s razor. Hanlon’s razor. US Government lying. They all fit. The published PR (including “Mccool video”) is a pile of rotting bullshit.
I unsub’d from this thread earlier today but it seems TD/WP doesn’t even honor that anymore. My 0321MST post didn’t show up until after 0845MST. The [paid] Crystal Ball has been 404s for 6 months.
I’m outta here. Those who care about facts – sorry I can’t share more. Those who wish to suck the government story dick – enjoy.
A few hypotheses
I doubt it was some other nation planning a DDoS attack because — for starters — they would have had the sophistication to put these in trucks so that they could shift the originating location of the attack and thus make it more difficult to track.
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Another possibility is “cheese-boxing as a service”. Quoting the book “Exploding the Phone”:
Or maybe they’re just helping people cheat at Pokémon Go.
Ars Technica covered the story well:
https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/09/us-uncovers-100000-sim-cards-that-could-have-shut-down-nyc-cell-network/
Silver lining?
On the other hand, let’s give credit where credit is due: taking down what seems to be a fairly large scam calling/text/anonymization service ring is a good thing. Too bad they tried to overplay their achievement.
Re: Scam? What scam?
What “fairly large scam” is related in the YT video or the other press releases? I don’t see or read one. All I see is that the USSS (whose job is not to locate Stingrays) claim a 4000 square mile area housed 300+ servers and 100,000+ SIMs.
Crime? None listed. Scam? None listed. Perpetrators/suspects/persons of interest [not a real thing]/indictees? None listed.
Do please humor me and every other person made stupider by watching or reading these pressers and elucidate as to what this “fairly large scam” is or was, and who orchestrated/perpetrated it, and to what ends.
The Trump2.0 government has its artwork department working overtime to make up crap to spew on the airwaves. Please show how this is different.