The discovery of SIM farms that threatened cellular networks in New York City is only the tip of a massive nationwide network run by the Chinese Communist government that poses an immediate threat to critical American infrastructure and has led to terrorist acts including hoax SWAT raids at the homes of national leaders, Blaze News has learned.
Sources in the Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. intelligence community said these SIM card networks were operating in the United States as early as 2004. They have proliferated exponentially since President Donald J. Trump was re-elected to the presidency in November 2024.
‘It’s absolutely an act of war.’
“This is something that is a direct threat to our nation right now,” a top intelligence official told Blaze News. “A direct threat to our nation, and it needs to be shut down today — like ASAP. Only five of them have been taken down so far.”
The owner of the five sites raided in the New York City area is cooperating with Homeland Security Investigations and the Secret Service, the intelligence expert said.
The SIM networks were put in place and are managed by China’s Ministry of State Security, an ultra-secretive, massive espionage agency that has grown in prominence and global activity in recent years, according to the journal China Leadership Monitor.
The MSS employs more than 800,000 people, nearly double the Soviet KGB at its peak. The MSS “now operates worldwide at a scale and tempo not seen in decades,” China Leadership Monitor wrote in a recent newsletter.
Several officials who spoke with Blaze News anonymously said the establishment and use of this destructive network by China should be considered an act of war. The potential threat to America would be “second only to thermonuclear war,” one source said.
“It’s absolutely an act of war — an internationally recognized act of war,” one intelligence expert told Blaze News. “Cyberattacks on critical infrastructure is, and facilitating terrorism to the point where you’re trying to kill high-ranking members of the United States government. Those two alone are acts of war.”
Recently, these SIM farms are believed to be responsible for dozens of hoax SWAT raids, including a senior U.S. Secret Service official, FBI Director Kash Patel, members of Congress including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), and media influencers such as Tim Pool and Stephen K. Bannon.
“These things were being used all summer to SWAT people since Trump was elected,” said one source, speaking anonymously because the source is not authorized to discuss an ongoing investigation. “Swatting — that’s a terrorist act. The Trump administration declared that a terrorist act.”
Homeland Security Investigations agents led September raids on five SIM farms tied to a secret nationwide network built by the Chinese Communist government.Photo by Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images
While the Chinese facilitated the SWAT raids, it is believed that Americans who are familiar with the system — either through a government or a criminal enterprise — are initiating the hoax calls, the source said.
The swatting of a senior Secret Service official and some Secret Service protectees last spring led to the investigation that discovered the Chinese SIM farms in the Tri-State area, the Secret Service confirmed to Blaze News. A Secret Service engineer assigned to the investigation was key to discovering the SIM network.
“The only reason we found this network is because a senior Secret Service official was targeted for a SWAT raid,” the source said. “Otherwise, this investigation would have never been initiated.”
No U.S. intelligence or law enforcement agency detected the secret network, nor did the three major wireless carriers in the U.S., AT&T Mobility, T-Mobile, and Verizon.
Homeland Security Investigations led raids that disrupted five SIM farm sites in the Tri-State area of New York City just before the United Nations General Assembly, where President Trump spoke Sept. 23. The raids led to seizure of more than 300 co-located servers and more than 100,000 SIM cards.
“The potential for disruption to our country’s telecommunications posed by this network of devices cannot be overstated,” Secret Service Director Sean Curran said in a statement. “The U.S. Secret Service’s protective mission is all about prevention, and this investigation makes it clear to potential bad actors that imminent threats to our protectees will be immediately investigated, tracked down and dismantled.”
Secret SIM farms are typically housed in nondescript corporate buildings and enable thousands of simultaneous cellular connections.U.S. Secret Service photos
An ongoing forensic investigation of the source of the servers and SIM cards is being carried out by Homeland Security Investigations, the Secret Service, the U.S. Department of Justice, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said Matt McCool, special agent in charge of the Secret Service New York Field Office.
“This was a difficult and complex effort to identify the source of these fraudulent calls and the impact on the Secret Service protective mission,” McCool said in a video statement.
The SIM farms and their networked cellular chips pose a threat to critical infrastructure with the ability to disable cell towers, enable internet denial of service attacks, and facilitate anonymous, encrypted communication between potential threat actors and criminal cartels, the Secret Service said.
‘They’ve launched legitimate cyberattacks against our critical infrastructure.’
Officials who spoke to Blaze News said the New York raids and seizure of servers are the tip of a much larger iceberg.
A nationwide network using millions of SIM cards operated by China has the capability to wipe out communications across entire regions with a cyberattack; target large lists of victims for hoax SWAT calls; act as chatbots to interact with teens and young adults in online forums such as Reddit; and operate identity-theft rackets, among other applications.
“What’s shocking is that there may be up to 100 or more of these sites everywhere,” an intelligence source told Blaze News. “There’s probably 60, 80, 100 of these in the United States.”
A SIM, or a subscriber identity module, is a small plastic card with an embedded silicon chip similar to chips found on credit cards. The chip has a microprocessor and memory circuits that store subscriber information including a device ID and authentication key so cellular networks can recognize each device. The SIM can store text messages and run applications.
U.S. Secret Service Director Sean Curran said the potential for disruption of cellular and other communications from secret SIM farms “cannot be overstated.”Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
A SIM farm is typically a nondescript room in a commercial building with dozens of SIM card servers stacked in metal racks. The device that holds the SIM cards is called a gateway, with 32 to 64 cellular modems with slots for 64 to 512 SIM cards, antennas, and ethernet ports for each SIM to connect to the internet wirelessly or via ethernet cables. The SIM farms don’t require huge power draws or generate substantial heat like traditional computer servers.
Experts say the potential for nefarious uses is huge — and so is the risk to national security.
George Hill, a retired FBI supervisory intelligence analyst who ran counterterrorism, counterintelligence, and cyber operations for the four-state Boston Field Office, told Blaze News that widespread cellular outages would be a disaster.
“EMS and hospitals rely almost exclusively on cell networks to coordinate responses to large-scale emergencies,” said Hill, a U.S. Marine veteran who also worked for the National Security Agency. “An attack in a major metropolitan area that loses cell service would result in EMS being unable to coordinate triage and the movement of injured people. This would then overburden radio networks, resulting in dispatch and redeployment of first responders going offline.”
The SIM farms can launch dangerous cyberattacks, spoof multifactor authentication to access and clean out bank accounts, and allow spies to carry out covert communications.
‘There may be up to 100 or more of these sites.’
“They’ve used these non-attributable networks to sneak into our networks,” the intelligence analyst told Blaze News. “So they’ve launched cyberattacks from these; they’ve launched legitimate cyberattacks against our critical infrastructure.”
The SIM farms can cost $10-$15 million per location to operate, but they actually make money because criminal organizations including drug cartels and scammers are allowed to use the networks, the source said. A site with 100 SIM gateway boxes can generate $240,000 per month in profit.
Most of the SIM farms have a multifactor authentication capability, so they can create real-looking accounts for social media, cryptocurrency wallets, email, and banking. They can also create undetectable chatbots on Reddit, Discord, and Meta platforms “to radicalize our citizens and divide our nation,” the source said.
Hill said the potential negative impacts from cyberattacks are staggering, affecting retail sales locations, banking, gasoline and petroleum refiners, and domestic military operations.
“The movement of traditional combat units’ equipment travels via the Military Sealift Command. These are government-owned ships operated by private companies,” Hill said. “These too would come offline, as would the use of trains to move heavy combat equipment inside the U.S.”
Blaze News reached out to the Secret Service, Homeland Security Investigations, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for comment on the SIM farms.
Coming next: How SIM farms masquerade as humans in online forums, radicalizing youth and encouraging violence.
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The post Exclusive: China behind massive nationwide SIM farm network that directly threatens American critical infrastructure appeared first on TheBlaze.
