EU Bans SIM Farms – Years Too Late, As Usual
At long last, the EU has decided to ban SIM farms. Only problem? The criminals have already spent the past five years rinsing us all with them. Great job, everyone.
If you somehow missed it, SIM farms are machines jammed with hundreds — sometimes thousands — of SIM cards. Their only purpose? Pumping out spam, scam calls, smishing attacks, and anything else that could make your phone and your life a little bit worse. They’ve been around for years. They've been obvious for years. And regulators have sat on their hands the entire time.
Now, finally, after every business has been flooded with phishing attempts and every individual has been battered with fake "urgent" texts from "Royal Mail," the EU has stirred from its slumber and decided that, actually, maybe we shouldn't let people operate industrial-grade cybercrime machines without any checks.
Incredible insight. Truly groundbreaking stuff.
The new ban means you’ll need authorisation to operate SIM farms. Bulk SIM activation is being clamped down on. Mobile providers will have to actually do something about it instead of shrugging and hoping the problem goes away. All good — but about five years too bloody late.
Because here’s the thing: these SIM farms were never hidden. They were openly advertised. They were stupidly cheap to set up. They were being used to bypass two-factor authentication, spam thousands of people at once, flood systems with phishing attacks — and nobody in a position of authority could be bothered to act with any urgency.
It’s not like we don’t know how SMS-based systems can be manipulated either. If you've ever watched Eurovision and wondered how a country with a song that sounds like a drunk goat falling down a flight of stairs still somehow racks up maximum points, you already understand exactly how easy it is to rig an SMS system. And that's with a live global audience watching. Now imagine what cybercriminals could get away with when nobody’s even looking.
So yes, banning SIM farms is the right move. But pretending this is some sort of heroic stand for cybersecurity now feels a bit rich. It's shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted, got on a plane, and started a new life overseas.
In the meantime, the damage has been done. Businesses have lost money. Individuals have been scammed. Mobile networks have been abused to hell and back. And criminals? They’ve already moved on to their next trick: AI scams, deepfake frauds, virtual number exploits. Banning SIM farms in 2025 is like finally banning fax machine spam in 2010 — very noble, very necessary, but so, so late to the party that the lights are already being turned off.
The bigger problem here is that governments and regulators still haven’t grasped the basic reality: technology evolves fast. Cybercriminals evolve faster. If your approach to stopping them involves "review processes" that take three to five years, you're just handing them a golden ticket.
By all means, let’s chalk this up as a win. It is — barely. It’s just one that would have been a hundred times more effective if it had happened when the problem first reared its head, not after it had already wrecked half the room.
Maybe next time, when something obviously broken is being exploited by everyone and their dog, regulators could do something radical — like acting quickly. But, let’s be honest, that's about as likely as the UK winning Eurovision on merit.
| Soruce | Article |
|---|---|
| Infosecurity Magazine | EU Agrees to Ban SIM Farms |
| Europol | SIM Card Fraudsters Dismantled in Major International Crackdown |
| ENISA | ENISA Threat Landscape Report 2022 |
| BBC News | Eurovision Voting Controversies Explained |
| Financial Times | SMS Scams and Mobile Fraud on the Rise |
| The Telegraph | UK Faces Rise in SIM Farm Scams |
| Threatpost | SIM Swap Surge Highlights Mobile Carrier Risks |