I not familiar with any of it, so I’m willing to take your word, but doesn’t the scope raise some eyebrows?

Using the prices quoted in TFA they’re talking about $900,000 in servers and another $500,000 in SIM cards, before labor, rent and electricity.

Is that sort of outlay typical for phone scammers.

Also on a technical note is there an advantage to having all your sites in the NYC area? Is it simply that there’s enough cell traffic, the bad actors illicit traffic won’t stand out?

No way, whatever the sim hardware cost is and the sim service per month for the carrier.

NYC is just high density, remember cell means cellular so the towers are configured for high traffic and more fall back, also being easy to go around in general, airports etc

Esims go for $5-10 a month. Hardware is less than 20k max. Apartment and general utilities are a sunk cost.

It was maybe $50k in hardware at each site.

They operate a bunch of cellular modems that send SMS spam, receive SMS verification codes for creating fake accounts, and use the data to act as proxies for web scraping and other nonsense. It isn't criminal, but it isn't exactly ethical either. But it is profitable.

You have to go swap out some of the SIM cards every day to get new numbers, so you need to balance spreading your locations out across multiple cell towers for throughput, but also needing to be within reasonable travel distance.

>Is that sort of outlay typical for phone scammers.

Really yes. If they're just selling VOIP routing to the US, they can sell essentially unlimited amounts of it. The more you invest, the more you profit. Grows organically and exponentially.

Each one of those units is probably ~$6k for the device and sim cards. I don't think there were that many of them in the pictures to add up to $900k.