On Christmas Day in 2023, a man called the suicide prevention hotline claiming he shot his girlfriend and threatened to kill himself. Police barreled toward the address, but turned around once before they arrived. It was a hoax; a swatting call at Marjorie Taylor Greene’s residence. Five days later, Florida GOP senator Rick Scott’s home in Florida was swatted.
Within a month of Donald Trump clinching his second presidential election win, several of his Cabinet picks and administration members were targeted in violent threats, including swatting incidents and bomb threats, his transition team said.
The wave of false descriptions of shootings and violence continued to assail high-level government officials; they targeted the federal judge overseeing Trump’s election subversion case, Maine’s Democratic secretary of state, then-presidential candidate Nikki Haley.
The threats weren’t legitimate. There were no shootings, no violence.
Yet, there was a real, legitimate, and “imminent threat” that the surge of swatting calls against high-ranking officials posed to the US Secret Service’s protective operations, said Matt McCool, the special agent in charge for the Secret Service New York field office.
So a unit of the service in its infancy set out six months ago to unmask the layers of burner phones, changing phone numbers, and SIM cards that were swatting American officials.
The Advanced Threat Interdiction Unit, along with a flurry of other law enforcement agencies — the Department of Homeland Security, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the New York Police Department, and other state and local law enforcement — began unraveling the web. It ended with the largest seizure of SIM servers and cards the Secret Service has ever seen.
The use of tens of thousands of SIM cards, law enforcement officials say, allowed “threat actors” to make thousands of calls using rapidly-changing phone numbers. – US Secret Service
Law enforcement officials uncovered over 300 SIM servers all within the New York tristate area. – US Secret Service
The new unit traced the swatting signals to an apartment just outside New York City. And they found another rented space. Then more.
Inside, they found no one.
But what they did find was a vast and stunning network of more than 300 SIM servers — capable of disabling cell phone towers and disrupting emergency services — all concentrated within 35 miles of New York City.
Over the past few weeks, the Secret Service discovered more than 100,000 SIM cards across numerous locations, all within the New York tristate area. Officials briefed on the investigation say the electronic safe houses were found in places like Armonk, New York; Greenwich, Connecticut; even in New York City in Queens; and across the river in New Jersey — essentially forming a circle around New York City’s cellular network infrastructure.
The hidden electronic maze was so powerful, it could have sent an encrypted and anonymous text to every human being in the United States within 12 minutes, McCool said. Its strength could have overwhelmed cell towers, toppled New York City’s cell service, and stopped every Manhattan resident from being able to access Google Maps.
To investigators, the operation appeared to be built for far more than just masking swatting calls — it was a massive communications exchange for spies, hackers, and organized crime.
The Secret Service hasn’t announced any arrests connected to the operation. But their early forensic analysis suggests foreign governments and criminals in the US are using the network to run their organizations, McCool said.
“That includes cartels, that includes human traffickers, that includes terrorists,” he told CNN.
The operation worked stealthily and unceasingly, with SIM cards being switched out quickly, to keep federal law enforcement off its trail. The servers could be commanded remotely to create massive amounts of phone traffic.
“It is absolutely well funded, and well organized,” McCool said.
The network has been taken down and is no longer a threat to New York, according to law enforcement officials.
But, McCool cautioned, “it would be unwise to think that there’s not other networks across the country.”
The Secret Service unit is continuing to work to identify other similar networks, he said.
“The potential for disruption to our country’s telecommunications posed by this network of devices cannot be overstated,” US Secret Service Director Sean Curran said.
CNN’s Nicki Brown and Jeff Winter contributed to this report.
For more CNN news and newsletters create an account at CNN.com
