A pair of representatives last week unveiled legislation targeting one piece of the increasingly industrialized fraud economy.

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Reps. Jefferson Shreve of Indiana and Rob Menendez of New Jersey introduced the Stop SIM Box Scams Act, which would ban manufacturing, importing, selling, leasing, advertising, owning or operating SIM boxes. It would also direct the Federal Communications Commission to coordinate with federal law enforcement to block imports and pursue the scam syndicates using them.

SIM boxes are devices that hold hundreds of SIM cards. Scammers use them to cycle through phone numbers to disguise their location when targeting potential victims. They are often employed in so-called pig-butchering scams in which criminals gradually develop relationships with victims over the phone to persuade them to send money to the scammer. Industrial-scale SIM farms located overseas use the devices to appear to be calling from a local number.

“That ‘local’ Indiana number on your phone may be a scammer calling from halfway around the world,” Shreve said in a Thursday (Oct. 1) press release announcing the bill. “I wrote this bill to stop scammers from using these machines to pose as our neighbors.”

“Scammers shouldn’t be able to use our area codes to rip off our communities,” Menendez said in the release.

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