Euro cops take down cybercrime network with 49M fake accounts
14 comments
·October 25, 2025devjab
mrtksn
I enjoyed the title more that I want to admit TBH :)
In every country in Europe people are pissed with their government and hate the police but when its a "Euro" thing it feels much better.
The online narrative may make you think that "Europe" is a dirty word(chat control, cookie banner, regulations, fines etc), but its actually much more pure than any local politics and much much less divisive. The "Euro cops" phrase gives me the feeling of bunch of police officers that are not particularly fun at parties but are definitely not corrupt.
isoprophlex
In my mind "euro cops" holds overtones of some a late-90s track-suit-and-nike shoes, bald shaven gabber rave robocop-from-amsterdam pastiche
KronisLV
> The coordinated takedown, codenamed Operation SIMCARTEL, took place on October 10 in Latvia, as part of a joint investigation by police in the Baltic nation, Austria, Estonia and Finland.
Not the best way to see my country in the news, but oh well.
That said, I wish I could reasonably do something similar to what's possible with e-mails: where you can have one mailbox per account/company you want to do interaction with, like aliexpress@mydomain.com, paypal@mydomain.com, banking@mydomain.com and so on. I'd like to have one phone number per company or whatever that I have to interact with, so that if they sell my data to third parties and I suddenly start getting advertisement/spam calls, I can figure out exactly who was acting badly.
makeitdouble
Honest question, how well does it go for for email ?
I did that pretty seriously for a while, and in my case I feel it led to nothing specific. I'd get spam from weird places and shut the address, but that would actually amount to an extremely small amount of the total spam I was getting.
Also my ISP or the phone company was selling away my email and there was no way I'd just block them, nor would they give a shit about my bitching to their customer support.
hofrogs
These burner phone numbers not exclusively used by criminals, a privacy-minded person would use those to make accounts on services that require a phone number (and sadly, it feels like there's a lot of these lately)
padjo
“Euro Cop” sounds like Jean-Claude Van Damme movie.
danjermaus
I misinterpreted the title and thought the cops used 49M fake accounts to take down the network
plank
Yep, I did as well. And visited the site to see how cops used fake accounts...
So... Clickbait title? ;-)
1oooqooq
why are taxes being used to moderate Facebook?
AmbroseBierce
If someone robs a costumer inside a McDonald's do you complain when the cops that arrive and capture the thieves are paid with taxes and not by McDonald's itself?
I don't think this comment will contribute much, so please forgive that, but calling a "Collaboration between Europol and the Shadowserver Foundation" for "Euro cops" is probably the most Australian thing I've ever seen on the entire internet.
https://www.europol.europa.eu/media-press/newsroom/news/cybe...