Inside Operation Sim Cartel: How Crime-as-a-Service Was Taken Down

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One of the biggest cybercrime busts of the decade just happened—and you probably didn’t hear about it.
In this gripping episode of The Deep Dive, we unpack the massive international takedown of a global Crime-as-a-Service operation headquartered in Latvia. What started as a SIM box scheme turned into a dark web empire—powering 49 million fake accounts, phishing rings, extortion scams, and even human smuggling.

Here’s what you’ll learn:

  • What SIM farms and SIM box fraud actually are—and how they steal from telecom giants
  • How criminals sold access to their infrastructure to scammers worldwide
  • The staggering impact: 49 million fake accounts used for phishing, extortion, impersonation, and more
  • Operation Sim Cartel: the joint Europol-EUROJUST crackdown that spanned Austria, Latvia, Estonia, and Finland
  • What was seized: 40,000 SIMs, 1,200 SIM boxes, €700,000+ in assets, and 5 major servers
  • The legal heart of the takedown: how Latvia’s criminal code handles jurisdiction, corporate liability, and asset recovery
  • The difference between direct and indirect intent in criminal law—and why it matters in digital crime
  • Why the law allows corporate liquidation and seizure of shared household property
  • Special confiscation: how the state can recover hidden or destroyed criminal proceeds
  • Retroactive law and the global stance on crimes against humanity

This isn’t just about cybercrime—it’s about how international law is evolving to fight back against the increasingly sophisticated, borderless nature of digital criminal enterprises. If you want to understand how governments actually dismantle high-tech crime networks, this is your episode.

Sponsored by StoneFly, leaders in secure enterprise storage, ransomware-proof systems, AI-ready cloud infrastructure, and immutable backups. Want to protect your organization’s data? Schedule a demo at stonefly.com.

Listen now—because this is what fighting modern organized crime really looks like.

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