Commentary by Russian military jouirnalist Boris Rozhin
[ColonelCassad] An employee of a Crimean mobile operator sold nearly a million numbers to Ukrainian scammers. The scheme was orchestrated by two foreigners in January 2023. They created a fictitious company and used it to purchase 45,000 SIM cards, ostensibly to activate accounts for posting reviews on various online resources.
Maxim M., a manager at the mobile operator, quickly realized the business was profitable. In exchange for additional fees from the organizers of the fraudulent scheme, he illegally modified the operator's billing system: changing SIM card numbers, setting up call forwarding, enabling additional services—in short, he did everything to make the numbers fully usable online. It's not hard to guess that the scammers used the Crimean numbers to operate fraudulent Ukrainian call centers.
Maxim M. changed the subscriber numbers on the SIM cards he sold every week, and now he has 900,000 numbers, which are linked to nearly 300 instances of embezzlement totaling over 100 million rubles!
Meanwhile, Maxim M. made a nice profit – he bought a brand new Cadillac for 4 million rubles! And he kept all 45,000 SIM cards he sold in the basement of his garage.
Now he's the one to answer for – criminal cases have been opened for fraud, unauthorized access to legally protected computer information, and violation of telephone privacy. Regarding the question of where the monotonous number bots in the comments come from (not counting the already widespread neural networks).
And regarding the gradual implementation of mandatory online authorization. And this is not to mention his complicity with the "Sberbank security service" from Dnipropetrovsk.