Racks upon racks of SIM boxes have been discovered in New York by the US Secret Service. A law enforcement official said the equipment was capable of sending 30 million text messages per minute. That is enough to spam every American within the space of 12 minutes, or everybody on the planet within 5 hours. It is unknown how long this enormous criminal operation had already been up and running.

BluGem's automated test devices are similar to the equipment seized in New York, but with one important difference; our global deployment is used to test networks on behalf of our clients and to gather intelligence to help fight crime. For example, we utilise some of our spare capacity to systematically record unsolicited scam and spam messages received by our devices. This acts as a 'honeypot', a mechanism to collect information about crime without waiting for the public to report which nuisance messages they have received.

Our sympathies lie with the telecoms networks who may struggle with the upward trend in the number of bad calls and messages they block, which cannot continue indefinitely. Endre Syvertsen of Telenor Linx recently stated the 30% year-on-year increase in blocking by his carrier is not sustainable in the long run. He called for greater efforts to stop illegal traffic at its source, including 'real accountability' in fraud prevention. We agree with Endre. The public is at risk and telcos cannot afford to spend limited capital on providing base stations and other network capacity to organised crime.

Our equipment can deliver accountability, if telcos and regulators agreed to their use for the monitoring and measurement of illegal traffic. Our existing honeypot only needs to be made more extensive and is easily scaleable. BluGem's devices reveal when bad communications continue to be received by end phone users, and they provide an early warning of new scam campaigns. The chief limitation is the difficulty involved in obtaining enough SIM cards to get fair coverage of every telco in every country. It can be time-consuming to procure a batch of x10 new SIMs for our honeypot through legitimate channels. Our experience of legally purchasing SIMs deserves to be compared with the way criminals can get SIM cards in bulk. The Secret Service discovered 100,000 SIMs within the 300 Sim boxes in New York.

Look here for more information about BluGem's scam honeypot service: https://blugem.com/solution/honeypots.