Europol announced on Friday the dismantling of a sophisticated cybercrime-as-a-service (CaaS) platform that operated a “SIM farm”, providing its clients with a wide range of crimes, from phishing to investment fraud. This operation, called Operation SIMCARTEL, involved 26 searches in several European countries, resulting in the arrest of seven suspects and the seizure of 1,200 SIM box devices containing 40,000 active SIM cards.
A sophisticated criminal operation
Among those arrested, five are of Latvian nationality. In addition, five servers were dismantled and two websites, gogetsms.com and apisim.com, that advertised the service were taken down and replaced with a seizure banner on October 10, 2025. The authorities also confiscated four luxury vehicles and froze €431,000 ($502,000) in the suspects’ bank accounts, as well as €266,000 ($310,000) in cryptocurrency accounts.
The operation involved law enforcement forces from Austria, Estonia, Finland, and Latvia, in collaboration with Europol and Eurojust. Europol attributes to this criminal network more than 1,700 individual cases of cyber fraud in Austria and 1,500 in Latvia, causing significant losses totaling around €4.5 million ($5.25 million) in Austria and €420,000 ($489,000) in Latvia.
The platform’s infrastructure allowed criminals to create more than 49 million online accounts, which were used to carry out phishing and smishing attacks and to deceive victims into investing money in fraudulent investment schemes. According to reports, some crimes of this organization included extortion, human smuggling, and the distribution of child sexual abuse material (CSAM).
GoGetSMS, one of the involved platforms, was marketed as a solution to obtain “fast and secure temporary phone numbers”, although users on Trustpilot have expressed their dissatisfaction with the lack of response from support and issues with the functionality of the service.
