the hacker news runs a story about interpol dismantling another sim farm.
the numbers in this one are smaller than the new york busts, but capable of building 49 million fake accounts. this is big. the implications are bigger.
https://archive.ph/ouhVe
https://thehackernews.com/2025/10/europol-dismantles-sim-farm-network.html
i have lots of thoughts. I've worked with and for businesses tangential to the technology used in the story. the way phone numbers are assigned in the u.s. and globally is slow moving. there are lots of "mom and pop" markets in the us with big swaths of spare pools, and "legitimate looking" exchange carriers, anonymizer services, temp-sms services, messaging gateways… if there's a hustling dollar to be made, the doors are open.
tip of the iceberg is my guess, and we wouldn't hear about it unless it was fully known and compromised.
and there are honest people who cannot fathom why anyone would inject fake
alongside people who think they can hide their fake data amongst what they think is real
it's a mess.
https://archive.ph/8AtwX
https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/amazons-cloud-unit-reports-outage-several-websites-down-2025-10-20/
multiple reports. here's a reuters article and archive as a test. thought this bbc error was humorous too.
I'm not particularly clever but I've seen through my years "ways in which this particular system could be exploited"
it generally just takes inside knowledge bc everything is designed to "oh please let this work". you're not wrong that holes are encouraged but it's a combination of all of the above. animals scrambling for a nut.