Chinese SIM farms are radicalizing Americans and destabilizing society, intel experts say

Swarms of sophisticated chatbots enabled by China are embedded in platforms like Reddit and Discord to radicalize America’s youth, foment political division, and encourage violence, according to intelligence experts.

The ability to create millions of online personas to invade chat groups and social media sites to, in essence, destabilize American society is one of the sinister uses of the Chinese-built SIM farms like the ones shut down around New York City in September, Blaze News has learned.

‘Our population is being literally divided and radicalized to destroy our nation.’

“They’re able to use this [SIM] network to initiate social media accounts by the millions,” said one intelligence analyst familiar with the ongoing SIM farm investigation by the Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. Secret Service, and other federal agencies.

“Social media accounts by the millions,” the analyst reiterated. “Because all of them have the ability to do multifactor authentication, they can create millions of digital personas that are real.”

So far, he said, the American government is “clueless.”

“Our biggest issue is that both the American political class and U.S. government officials are completely clueless on this threat,” he said. “Our population is being literally divided and radicalized to destroy our nation. This is provable, but I think it would require so much more investigation to be able to show people, even on our side, how bad the problem is.”

SIM farms pair with AI

The process is started manually in China. It can have a deep reach into American society.

“It appears they have thousands of people in China that set this up manually. And then they use really sophisticated AI like ChatGPT to spread certain themes and certain messages — all designed, obviously, to divide our country and to create division,” the analyst said.

Election-themed chat threads are often flooded with nefarious bots pushing anti-Trump propaganda. From the outside, these often look like U.S. voters engaged in simple political debate.

However, the threats are not limited to chatbots.

After a series of high-profile swatting incidents targeting senior Secret Service officials and Secret Service protectees last spring, an investigation discovered the presence of SIM farms that are likely spread across America to carry out cyber terrorism and threaten cellular networks and internet access.

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A New York City SIM farm raided by federal officials in September is tied to China.Photos by U.S. Secret Service

Homeland Security Investigations and the Secret Service raided five SIM farms in the greater New York City area. They disabled and seized more than 300 SIM servers operating from nondescript corporate office locations.

The farms use hundreds of thousands of SIM cards to create online cell numbers that can send out mass texts and synchronized attacks to lay siege to America’s critical infrastructure.

Among the more chilling aspects of these SIM farms is the ability to mimic humans to carry out sophisticated propaganda campaigns to promote progressive causes and radicalize people against the government and each other, intelligence officials told Blaze News.

“They actually groom you. Believe it or not, there’s a chatbot that can pretend to be 27 personalities and is designed to groom you, to groom anybody that asks certain questions or that mentions certain topics,” one expert said. “It’s just a chatbot, and it has very little human supervision.”

Having a real mobile telephone number associated with the SIM cards gives the system flexibility and secrecy. Each server can have up to 512 SIM cards to send texts, make calls, and run apps. Millions of the SIM cards are likely engaged in this SIM farm network at any one time. Each farm location likely has racks and racks of servers and modems working in tandem.

’It allows you to assume someone else’s identity, their phone, their phone number.’

“Having a real phone number that can be associated to a social media account and having that avenue with multifactor authentication capability makes for a nearly undetectable bot account,” he said. “As long as your AI can avoid repetitive or ‘bot-like’ messaging, you will be undetectable.”

A real phone number that can continuously be associated with a particular social media account is a key, he said.

This activity has developed “under the radar,” he said, and the U.S. government is not aggressively seeking out and destroying this nefarious system. The need is urgent.

“Here’s the problem,” he said. “Despite the fact that foreign governments are radicalizing our sovereign nation’s citizens to destroy this country, they are not doing it in a way that the government employees can feel is so important that they would investigate it.”

Private companies that do social media and open-source intelligence can detect the bots, “but nobody is paying them to investigate or report it,” the analyst said.

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By adopting the $8 per month blue-checkmark authentication system, X has greatly limited the penetration of chatbots, experts say.Photo illustration by Cheng Xin/Getty Images

The bots have dynamic and parallel capabilities that allow such subtle messaging. The War Department’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency ran a “Defeat Disinfo” project that identified the best way to create a subtle social media messaging system “to brainwash an entire population in a completely undetectable way,” he said.

The bot technology is especially prevalent on platforms like Reddit and Discord, the analyst said. After Elon Musk purchased Twitter and rebranded it X, the prevalence of nefarious chatbots on that platform dropped precipitously, he said. By charging $8 a month for an authenticated blue checkmark, X limits the ability of fake accounts to penetrate its huge user base.

‘Our own telecoms are hosting a Chinese act of war against us.’

On Oct. 12, X announced it had purged 1.7 million bot accounts for engaging in reply spam.

“You should start experiencing improvement in the coming days,” Nikita Bier, head of product at X, wrote. “We will be focusing on [direct message] spam next.”

The analyst estimated that X is no more than 20%-30% bots. Reddit, however, “is like 80% bots,” the intelligence analyst told Blaze News. “It’s absolutely horrible.

Foment violent division

“The open-source intelligence community, who are mostly contractors that monitor and look for bots, estimate Reddit is about 80% bots. All designed to push a Democrat narrative or a very highly progressive narrative towards the left, but also to foment violent division. Violent division.”

The bots have built-in safeguards so as not to be flagged by the system for “bot-like behavior,” the analyst said. “So they usually don’t mention firearms. They’re normally very, very subtle. It’s so subtle. You would never know. You might be responding to the same dude that’s just hitting likes on your thing for three years.”

While the SIM farms create massive numbers of new identities, each with its own phone number, they can also co-opt existing accounts.

“A lot of these SIM farms allow you to clone an identity,” the analyst said. “So it allows you to assume someone else’s identity, their phone, their phone number.”

Homeland Security Investigations agents led September raids on five SIM farms tied to a secret nationwide network built by the Chinese communist government.Photo by Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images

The SIM farm networks are used by China, but also by criminal syndicates, drug cartels, and other malefactors, allegedly including Antifa. No matter who the user is, all of the data from the transactions is copied back to China, he said. The Chinese communist government requires all manufacturers of telecommunications equipment and computers to spy on behalf of the Ministry of State Security.

“Everything that’s happening on those devices is all going back to China,” he said, “even when the cartel uses them; or even when the United States government uses them; or even when the swatting people are using them; when the terrorists are using them; even when Antifa is using them.”

The SIM farms can be used to recruit radicals who are ready and willing to engage in violence outside immigration facilities — as is happening in Chicago and Portland.

‘We’re in a difficult position. It’s a catch-22.’

The analyst said there’s a good chance that China has been behind the establishment of Antifa chapters in the United States.

“It’s possible that they’re coordinating all of these chapters so that there’s a good chance that Antifa is actually a foreign terrorist organization,” he said. “In other words, it is a distributed terrorism network being unwittingly influenced by a Chinese sabotage network.”

Getting serious about stamping out these SIM farms will require the involvement of regulatory agencies including the Federal Communications Commission, he said.

A recent Reddit discussion on the assassination of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk.Reddit

“The FCC should be engaged to fine $100 million or $200 million per telecom until they get rid of every single one of these [farms] they are hosting. Our own telecoms are hosting a Chinese act of war against us.”

The effort will also require action by Congress, he said, to make radicalizing American citizens by foreign actors a crime.

“The U.S. Secret Service subpoenaed Google to get the MFA short codes for the Google voice accounts that the bad guys were using,” he said. “But until we make ‘intentionally radicalizing U.S. citizens to destroy their own country’ something that is illegal and also important to prosecute, the U.S. government will never even look into it.”

Major resources are needed to analyze each SIM farm in hopes of finding more of the estimated 80-100 sites operating in the United States.

“You could start up a whole new government program office just to deal with the forensics and to find the rest of these sites,” he said.

“So we’re in a difficult position. It’s a catch-22,” the analyst said. “We won’t discover how urgent and destructive this problem is until we investigate it. We won’t investigate it until they discover how urgent and destructive it is.”

Blaze News reached out to Reddit, Discord, and the U.S. Secret Service for more comment.

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