If you've ever dealt with home insurance you try very hard to not have to deal with home insurance.

To say your goals are cross-aligned with theirs would be an understatement.

Thankfully functionality isn't usually necessary to get a successful scan, unlike living targets.

The vaping community was basically shorting the cells. I'm not sure how a modern 18650 or prismatic cell would handle that.

I think the author does a good job of showing how commoditized this kind of crime is. There are no special insights here that someone who wanted to do this thing couldn't easily find on their own.

The device is probably 256 of those, or similar, chipsets on a board with integrated SIM slots and connectors for SMA antennas. You'd have a hard time producing something like this cheaper than China.

There's only 64 antennas but 256 SIMs, so there are either 64 separate quad-SIM modems (AFAIK only Mediatek made those, and in 2G only) or it's just one big FPGA, managed by a small CPU and connected to a bunch of RF ICs, like the inverse of a base station.

Or there are 64 modems that can switch between 4 SIM slots.

Better in what way? MobileX may have some properties that are attractive to criminals.

Mobile-X is cheap and is "pay for what you use"

I don't think there's some other seedy reason - Mobile-X is just the least expensive option I know of right now in the US that can be purchased at retail, so that is probably the main reason

More data etc, lower price.

I checked less than 90 days ago, and Mobile-X was cheaper than any other MVNO with retail availability in the US.

Do you have links to services that cost less, per line/sim? I don't think they exist, especially at retail.

I might then be completely wrong.

Common carriers are usually absolved of the malfeasance of their customers.

Probably a lot of places to buy MVNO sim cards from with cash as well.

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.

The article describes 300 servers and 100,000 SIMs across a handul of locations.

In some countries you can find entire office blocks filled with people who do nothing all day but participate in scam enterprises. I don't think the scale of this phone bank, if its as described, is that surprising really.

They made cold calling illegal in my country. Also you cannot just sell customer data. It made an entire industry disappear and nobody mourned.

But I'm sure some American lawyer would call that a breach of the constitution.

How does your country protect against callers and data sales outside of its jurisdiction?

Sounds pretty click-baity but if a company put the name of my software on an opaque list that ships with the OS that makes my software behave differently than I expect it to and didn't even TELL ME about it I'd be way WAY more pissed than this guy is.

Drivers do this to every single videogame. And it is good, otherwise those game would not run in every consumer 3d card.

I'm sure the driver devs have at least some interaction with the game devs when they do this.