Yeah, they are putting two facts together to heavily imply that they are part of a single story, but there is no evidence presented that they are. "UN leaders are gathering!" "There is a huge SIM farm that could disrupt communications!" Both true, but seemingly unrelated. All those car warranty texts have to come from somewhere - this is probably where.

It’s not. The Secret Service already has identified nation stare actors as being responsible.

That doesn't mean it wasn't money-making scams. North Korea engages in crypto theft all the time.

I'm sure they'll find someone specific eventually

Exactly. And the whole point of a cellular network architecture is that it's resistant to DoS attacks (what the rubes call "unexpectedly heavy usage"). Sure, you can take a cell out with a hundred fake phones, and all the users in that cell will hop to the next one. Or at worst walk a block over to find another. The attack doesn't scale, at all.

And even if you wanted to deploy custom hardware to do it, it would be far easier to just use a high power jammer on the band anyway than mucking around with all those SIMs.

These are for making actual use of the telecom facilities at scale, with the anonymity you get from burner SIMs. It's fraud, not terrorism.

Some parts of it are (DoS resistant.) And some carriers are more resistant than others. Verizon's CDMA from the 90s / early 2000s was NOTORIOUS for falling over when too many people texted at the same time. But yeah, it's been a while since things were that bad.

Yes, they were using these to commit crimes, and will miss them.

Wait. What? My car warrant is expiring? If only there were some way to get more information and perhaps extend it ...