Secret Service traced swatting threats against officials. They found 300 servers capable of crippling New York’s cell system

By John Miller, Celina Tebor, CNN

(CNN) — On Christmas Day 2023, a man called the suicide prevention hotline claiming he had shot his girlfriend and threatening to kill himself. Police barreled toward the address but turned around before they arrived.

It was a hoax – a swatting call at Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Georgia residence.

Five days later, GOP Sen. Rick Scott’s home in Florida was swatted.

The wave of false alarms about shootings and violence continued to assail high-level government officials: the federal judge overseeing Trump’s election subversion case, then-Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley, Maine’s Democratic secretary of state.

Within a month of Donald Trump clinching his second presidential election win, several of his Cabinet picks and administration appointees also were targeted with threats, including calls about bombs and swatting, his transition team said.

The threats weren’t legitimate. There were no shootings, no violence.

Still, the surge of swatting calls against high-ranking officials posed a real and “imminent threat” to the Secret Service’s protective operations, said Matt McCool, the special agent in charge of the agency’s New York field office.

So, a fledgling unit of the service set out six months ago to unmask the layers of burner phones, changing phone numbers and SIM cards 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.

What they found was an operation apparently capable of chaos far beyond masking swatting calls to potentially disabling cell phone towers, disrupting emergency services and enabling spies, hackers and organized crime.

The new unit traced the swatting signals to an apartment just outside New York City.

They found another rented space.

Then, more.

No one was inside.

Instead, they found a vast and stunning network of more than 100,000 SIM cards and 300 SIM servers – the largest seizure ever of such devices by the Secret Service – all concentrated within 35 miles of New York City.

The servers could be commanded remotely to create massive amounts of phone traffic in a stealthy and unceasing operation that switched out SIM cards quickly to keep federal law enforcement off its trail.

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. It could have overwhelmed cell towers, toppling New York City’s cell service and preventing every Manhattan resident from accessing Google Maps.

The electronic safe houses were found in places including Armonk, New York; Greenwich, Connecticut; Queens, New York; and across the river in New Jersey – essentially forming a circle around New York City’s cellular network infrastructure, officials briefed on the investigation said.

The Secret Service hasn’t announced any arrests connected to the operation. But its early forensic analysis suggests foreign governments and criminals in the US have used the network to run their organizations, McCool said.

“That includes cartels, that includes human traffickers, that includes terrorists,” he told CNN. “It is absolutely well funded and well-organized.”

The network has been taken down and is no longer a threat to New York, law enforcement officials said.

But, McCool cautioned, “It would be unwise to think that there’s not other networks across the country.”

The Secret Service unit is now working 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.

Wireless service provider MobileX, whose SIM cards are featured in photographs of items seized in the investigation, said it was “fully prepared to cooperate with the authorities should they reach out.”

“We are aware of recent reports that MobileX SIM cards, along with those of other providers, were recovered during a federal investigation,” MobileX founder and CEO Peter Adderton said in a statement. “Our platform is designed to be easy to use and cost-effective, qualities that unfortunately can also attract occasional bad actors. MobileX has robust safeguards in place to identify and block automated or bulk usage, and we shut down suspicious activity on our network every day.”

This story has been updated with additional information.

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2025 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.

CNN’s Nicki Brown and Jeff Winter contributed to this report.