Soldiers bust massive click-farm that used 500k SIM cards, 100s of mobes to big up web tat A massive click-fraud farm has been raided in Thailand by police and army troops, who seized nearly half a million SIM cards and hundreds of iPhones used to promote products online. The raid on two rented houses in Ban Mai Nong Sai in the Aranyaprathet District led to the arrest of three Chinese suspects: Wang Dong, 33, Niu …
If I was to hazard a guess you can have 3 sims per iPhone (this may be more if they can be chained I don't know) and you can switch sim in ios (apparently). Therefore you would root the phone and write an app that is controlled by a control server, each device has it's own id so you would just write a loop to command each phone to do whatever you need it to do in one go. At 3 sims per phone that would be 1422 a pop. I guess they purchased pre-loaded cards that just activated on connection or bought them in bulk and wrote a script to activate and top up.
Though yes it would be interesting to know but I can't see them releasing that information.
Keep in mind that this is propaganda from a (military) government. People are pretty unhappy because of slow economy so it likes to display foreigners to keep the own population quiet and tame. It's to distract from other issues and to keep face. A new SIM card would cost ฿3 ($0.10), and they don't write if they were actually registered for use or just unsold expired ones.
Why would you need SIM cards for a clickfarm? Just use wifi!
Even if you did need them, why would you need almost 1000 SIM cards per phone? Who had the shitty job of "full time SIM swapper" at this outfit?
I think there's more to this story, maybe something was lost in translation...
How about the joke from The IT Crowd where she started to date a guy named Peter File? She broke up shortly after meeting him when she heard his name spoken out loud, as in "Is there a Peter File here?" Fellow Left-Pondians keep in mind the British pronunciation of "pedophile" is PEE-DUH-FILE.
True a modern phone is quite small, but when you have that many together...
OTOH the cards are quite small.
My instinct is someone has built custom racks with a lot of SIM slots in that time slice between a (relatively) small number of actual phones. Throughput then depends on how fast the phones can be made to swap cards in software.
Another option would be such a rack with GMS modules, essentially phones without displays, microphones or speakers, used by things like drinks machines to let the HO know they've run out of cans.
But SIM card swapping on this scale is going to be a real PITA.
Nope, from the video in this article, it's just a big old rack of phones. Presumably they picked something with multiple SIM slots.
Also from the video, it looks like most of the SIMs were still boxed, either to be swapped in when the old ones were banned/out of credit, or perhaps they were planning to expand.
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