The post Europol dismantles Latvian platform servicing phishing scammers, investment fraud appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

Europol has announced the disruption of a sophisticated cybercrime-as-a-service (CaaS) platform. According to the agency, the Friday operation caused a dent in a platform that operated a SIM farm and enabled its sets to carry out diverse crimes ranging from phishing scams to investment fraud. In a statement by the agency, the operation, dubbed Operation SIMCARTEL, saw 26 strategic searches carried out in a coordinated law enforcement effort. Europol mentioned that the operation resulted in the arrest of seven suspects and the seizure of 1,200 SIM box devices, which contained more than 40,000 active SIM cards. Five of the detained suspects were Latvian internationals. The Latvian police mentioned in an announcement that the platform was related to anonymous communication and payments, impacting more than 3,200 people in different countries. Europol apprehends suspects in CaaS platform disruption Europol also claimed that it dismantled five servers tied to the operation, taking over two websites, gogetsms[.]com and apisim[.]com, that were used to advertise the services. The websites have since been branded with a banner stating that it has been seized by authorities. In addition, four luxury vehicles were confiscated, with €431,000 ($502,000) in suspects’ bank accounts and €266,000 ($310,000) in their cryptocurrency accounts frozen by Europol. The operation consisted of law enforcement from countries like Austria, Latvia, Finland, and Estonia, in collaboration with Europol and Eurojust. In its statement, Europol said the criminal network was responsible for more than 1,700 individual cyber fraud cases in Austria and 1,500 cases in Latvia. The agency also claimed that victims have lost a cumulative €4.5 million ($5.25 million) and €420,000 ($489,000) in the two countries, respectively, due to their services and operations. “The criminal network and its infrastructure were technically highly sophisticated and enabled perpetrators around the world to use this SIM-box service to conduct a…

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Filed under: News - @ October 19, 2025 11:25 am