An international law enforcement operation in Latvia has brought down a major cybercrime-as-a-service network.
Seven suspects were arrested, most of them Latvian nationals.
The coordinated action, codenamed SIMCARTEL, took place on 10 October. Police from Latvia, Austria, and Estonia worked alongside Europol and Eurojust.
Investigators say the group was behind thousands of scams across Europe, defrauding victims through sophisticated telecom schemes. More than 3,200 cases have been reported (roughly 1,700 in Austria and 1,500 in Latvia) with losses nearing €5 million.
Authorities seized the network’s infrastructure, including 1,200 SIM box devices and 40,000 active SIM cards used to mask and reroute calls.
This setup enabled a range of crimes beyond fraud, from extortion and migrant smuggling to the distribution of child sexual abuse material.
Five servers linked to the operation were also taken down. Footage released by police shows Latvia’s Counterterrorism Unit, OMEGA, carrying out tactical raids as part of the coordinated strike.
The takedown is a major disruption to one of Europe’s more organized cybercrime networks, a service built to help malefactors operate at scale, and one that left thousands of victims and millions in losses across the continent.
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