Australian police seize devices used to send over 318 million phishing texts

Australian police forces have 29 SIM boxes and “thousands” of SIM cards during raids in several states aimed at curtailing smishing - SMS phishing - attacks.

In NSW, 26 of the cellular devices - which contain a number of SIM slots and are capable of sending large volumes of text messages - were located, while three were uncovered in Victoria.

The 26 SIM boxes seized in NSW had been used to send “over 318 million messages over the past several months, scamming victims out of millions of dollars”, authorities there said.

Victorian authorities did not say how many messages the boxes seized in that state had been used to send, but suggested they may have been “capable of sending hundreds of thousands of simultaneous malicious text messages a day.”

Six arrests were made - four in NSW and two in Victoria - and a range of charges have been laid.

NSW Police initiated the investigation in March but ran it through the AFP-led Joint Policing Cybercrime Coordination Centre (JPC3), which has involvement from all state and territory police agencies, as well as the Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre (AUSTRAC).

AFP Detective Superintendent Tim Stainton said in a statement that SIM boxes are “cheap and malicious machines criminals used to defraud hundreds of victims at a time.” 

"Criminals will send millions of deceptive text messages to Australian mobile users' casting a wide net over the entire community in an attempt to trap and defraud as many victims as possible," Stainton said.

"If not disrupted through police action, the SIM boxes had a combined potential to continue to distribute between four and six million fraudulent messages every day.”

Read more about strategies for security threat prevention in the iTnews State of Security report.