Officials with SIM Boxes seized in Trichy Trichy city cybercrime police have busted a ‘sim box farm’ and arrested a man who was operating multiple multi-port GSM VoIP (Voice Over internet Protocol) gateways to connect cyber scammers based in foreign countries with Trichy residents.The seized farm primarily facilitated online investment frauds like fake stock-market and trading applications, WhatsApp stock-advisory groups, cryptocurrency schemes and high-yield investment programmes. Over the past ten months, more than a hundred residents have collectively lost approximately ₹4.5 crore. Police, however, said their awareness initiatives have reduced such offences compared to last year, and the latest bust is expected to sharply curb these crimes.Acting on intelligence inputs and a complaint from the department of telecommunications (DoT), officers raided a place near Puthur in Trichy on Tuesday and seized six multi-port GSM VoIP gateways, a modem, UPS units, cameras and related equipment. They arrested a 40-year-old engineering graduate who was operating the setup. Police have kept his name under wraps for the sake of ongoing investigations.Sim boxes, also called sim farms or sim banks, are hardware gateways that hold dozens of physical sims or e-sim profiles and route high volumes of voice, SMS or data traffic between internet-based systems and mobile networks. In illicit use, they support bulk spam, phishing, OTP farming and account creation while rotating numbers to evade carrier blocks.The devices enabled international VoIP traffic to be ‘terminated’ through local sim cards, making calls and messages appear as ordinary domestic mobile activity. This technique bypasses official international termination charges, lowers costs for operators and obscures the true origin of communications. Officials said the same infrastructure is routinely deployed in digital-arrest scams, sextortion, loan-recovery threats and financial frauds.“We are continuing our investigation to find out if there are more such farm sites,” deputy commissioner B Manikandan said. Last year, around 400 complaints were recorded in Trichy city. Police attribute a subsequent decline in incidents to sustained awareness meetings that sensitised residents to common cyber offences.Cybercrime police indicate that a majority of investment-fraud rings operating against Indian targets are based in Malaysia, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Myanmar. Many of the operators are Indians working in or having been trained inside scam compounds in those countries. The cross-border distance complicates recovery of funds. In contrast, online shopping frauds offering “unrealistically low prices” and fake-review job schemes are more often run by domestic networks.Cyber Crime Police estimate that more than 95 % of entities claiming to be institutional traders on social media and soliciting public investment are fraudulent. The Trichy bust forms part of a wider pattern. Earlier this month, Karnataka cyber command, working with DoT, raided two places in Bengaluru’s Whitefield and seized ten eSIM-enabled sim boxes and arrested four people linked to a Maharashtra supply chain.Technical analysis of that network led investigators to two additional sites in the recently busted Trichy, and Thanjavur, where 10 e-sim-enabled devices have been seized, confirming an interstate racket. Separately, Agra police dismantled a similar operation, recovering eight sim boxes.
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