Preventing the use of SIM farms for fraud: consultation

I don’t see any evidence in the proposal that fraud is known to have originated from UK-based SIM farms. Maybe I missed this, but even so I can’t imagine that banning these devices would have any impact on fraud.<p>It would be just as easy to get SIMs that support roaming and text outside the UK, or better yet just use WiFi texting.

What about the sim farm I use to delegate my SMS OTP codes to? No VOIP numbers don&#x27;t work for everything, no using the same SIM card doesn&#x27;t work, no I don&#x27;t want to worry about running dozens of phones with batteries and no I&#x27;m not even sending messages.<p>Local TOTP key as a second factor should be more standard.<p>Especially if I&#x27;m already paying for a service you shouldn&#x27;t need SMS as a crappy veiled proxy for some human verification.<p>Supposed to pretend like this doesn&#x27;t just force people to use more phones?

We can all agree that fraudsters preying on the UK citizens are a bad thing, so the intent of the proposal is sound. What is not s the definition of a SIM farm. Any device with more than 4 SIMS would be outlawed. Don&#x27;t know if you ever watch live TV or video streams from remote places, like breaking news stories, or sports events or civic events? These are pretty uniformly transmitted from the camera to the production control room via IP-video over bonded cellular. The encoders used can carry more the 16 SIMs. Plus bonded cellular is used t provide data connectivity for a whole range of commercial and public service uses. As it stands the proposal would make these legitimate uses criminal offences.

&gt; SIM farms are devices that can house hundreds of SIM cards, which can send out thousands of scam texts to defraud the UK public of millions of pounds. In addition to sending scam texts, these devices are used by criminals to run scam call campaigns and to post misleading, false or phishing messages on social media in bulk.<p>&gt; Whilst there are some potentially legitimate uses of the technology, these are limited and should not require using more than four SIM cards, based on the number of mobile operators in the UK. We have very limited evidence that there are any legitimate use cases for devices that allow the use of more than four SIM cards, and for all such cases alternative options exist.<p>The justification seems sound. What is the issue here?

Banning devices has not historically been a very effective way to prevent crime.<p>I am not an expert in modern mobile network technology so I’ll do something unusual for HN and refrain from suggesting a solution.

absolutely wrong approach. fix this at the carrier level and not client device level.

Banning &quot;devices for more than four SIM cards&quot;...<p>In my opinion, this is again just an excuse reason for a backdoor law to better control the population. 1984 style Ensuring that they can more easily control the lines that you have. Like that they can make mandatory the used of a registered phone number for online registrations like social accounts and be sure that you will not circumvent blocking by opening new lines.<p>Think about it, if you want to solve the problem that they pretend they want to solve: Each subscriber in UK is registered, so that if you open one or 50 lines, the will know you identity the same.<p>So, if you are a scammer or fraudster, they should already be able to arrest and jail you!<p>But take care, because here they only speak about sim, but it will also probably apply to virtual sims and require that you register all your foreign sim cards that did not use to be declared so far...

What is this going to accomplish given that most scammers aren&#x27;t operating on UK soil?

Are operators doing spam filtering for outgoing SMS messages? The messaging patterns must be quite different from normal customers. Maybe you could also detect the suspicious amount of messages originating from certain location (cell).

Given that gov.uk is already so surveillance happy, I’m surprised they haven’t just mandated ID cards and then required SIMs to be linked to one of those or a passport

&gt; Today, I have published a Fraud Strategy setting out the government’s ambition to cut fraud by 10% from 2019 levels, down to 3.33 million frauds by the end of 2024.<p>Our current gov taking on these kind of moonshots makes you proud to be British.

What happens with eSIM devices?