Euro cops take down cybercrime network with 49M fake accounts (opens in new tab)

This reminded me of something Jean-Claude Juncker once said about democracy in the EU:

> We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it.

Being a step removed from local politics means they can do stuff without the immediate fear they're all kicked out, but the other downside of people not really caring who they elect is it's relatively easy to be elected on a "We hate the EU" line. It's a weird place.

The EU has its advantages, but I'd never list "more pure" and "not corrupt" among them. The EU introduced lobbying (=legal corruption) into European politics when most countries historically didn't have much of it. It also has a massive amount of normal, God-fearing illegal corruption.

Many of the biggest stories about the EU are about or have a sizable aspect of corruption. Chat Control amd Thorn, Ursula von der Leyen and Big Pharma, Ursula von der Leyen and $anything.

Follow the Money is a thriving investigative journalism publication that lives off uncovering corruption in the EU.

https://netzpolitik.org/2022/dude-wheres-my-privacy-how-a-ho...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfizergate

https://www.ftm.eu/

> In every country in Europe people are pissed with their government and hate the police

Objectively false [1]. Europe is pissed at government (~30% approval) and love the police (70% approval). Hating on police is an US thing exclusively.

1: https://opendata.cbs.nl/#/CBS/nl/dataset/80518ned/table

> In every country in Europe people are pissed with their government and hate the police

those exist, never met any luckily, guess I hang in positive circles.

> when its a "Euro" thing it feels much better.

A sense of unity builds optimism, especially in very troubled times.

I mean your version is much more entertaining, but there was a TV series (1988-1992) that was actually called Eurocops. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094456/

Yea, same feeling here. I did that for a while but in the end I maybe went ahead and blocked one address in over 10 years of doing that. It was more of a hassle than it was worth, especially if you want to do password resets and you have to dig up that email again vs. just typing your default one.

I personally like the idea that my bank account has a completely different email and password then any other account.

In theory, criminals don't know where to even try to exploit/phish.

The advantage isn't necessarily about blocking addresses but them not being able to be correlated. Nowadays every product sends your email to ad providers (Facebook, etc), sometimes in hashed form. Using unique addresses per company defeats such tracking.

Similarly they also do it with the phone number, which is also why the techbros hate these SIM farms so much.

Spam is so easy to identify I don't bother. I can tell a message is spam from the subjectline + sender I would say almost 100% of the time. Those messages get deleted unread.

If you give your real email, almost every service starts spamming you - they think that annoying people is a "growth hack". Use temporary email whenever possible.

they can know your inner monologue, thoughts precisely

> but instead rotate through in order to avoid arousing suspicion

Also to use fewer resources! Compared to the SIM cards, the radio/modems are expensive. It's cheaper to reuse one radio/modem cycling through different SIM cards for just long enough to receive pending SMSes. But not too many, or you increase latency. It's probably more suspicious to have the same modems cycling through SIM cards than to have all of them always connected.

No, the denser the area the more radio towers there are making precision better.

This group was in Latvia, last week they raided a SIM farm near New York, but the article came from Australia, and they are acting weird.

Instead of requiring a phone number, accept a small amount ($1-2) in cryptocurrency. You can charge extra if the user sends too many DMs or gives too many likes. Perfect solution against spammers.

However, personal information costs much more than $2, so the companies will continue to demand a phone number. Mobile OS developers even developed a format for automatically transferring SMS OTP to a website to help scammy companies.

Mass SMS is illegal on the part of the sender, not any intermediary services. Anti-anti-bot is a good thing since anti-bot is destroying the internet.

After the USA did the exact same thing, I'm predisposed to not trust this statement without seeing any evidence. The USA seems to have assumed criminal activity simply based on the fact of unusual hardware, and I'd like to see evidence the EU hasn't done the same. Perhaps my skepticism is misplaced though, perhaps the police over there are less arrest-hungry and they have only done this after having real evidence that this SIM farm actually belongs to a spam ring and isn't just something they use.

This is not about individual network operators making the choice by themselves, rather they are many times compelled to do so by law.

This is partucularly problematic when it comes to mobile services as they allow people to be tracked.

The only real solution to these problems is to convert the accounts of the elderly or anyone who can't be trusted to spot scammers into joint accounts with restrictions on large transactions controlled by a trusted family member or nominee.

so, punish facebook. don't use my taxes to persecute criminally someone using the badly designed system.

they would have close banks or newspapers for much less.

If you can't afford to buy a costume, just wear your nicest regular outfit. Fancy dress is not worth jail time.