Have you ever thought to yourself that you need to buy an IMSI-catcher to track down somebody in a tower block? Normal people do not buy IMSI-catchers, SMS blasters or any variety of rogue base station. Normal people do not have a license to use radio telecoms devices like these. However, that does not discourage YouTube from maintaining the pretense that there is nothing wrong with adverts showing how to use IMSI-catchers carried in backpacks around shopping malls or mounted on vehicles that drive around densely populated residential areas. Ordinary people would have no understanding of what is being offered by the following text, shown at the end of three new YouTube adverts, but criminals know why they want to buy equipment like this.
If you need IMSI Catcher, Monitoring And Interception, SMS sender, Mobile communication Control Device, please send to [email protected]
The only people with a legitimate reason to purchase an IMSI-catcher would be police, security services, and the search and rescue teams that need to find hikers lost in the wilderness. I hope none of those organizations has a procurement process that begins with searching YouTube for a vendor with an obscure gmail address. This is the address offered by a vendor that recently created a YouTube account called ‘IMSI Catcher’ to upload three slickly-produced advertising videos.
It is quick and easy to find these videos. That makes it both comical and repugnant that Google owns YouTube, Google runs Gmail, Google has search, and Google claims to have developed groundbreaking AI, but Google also claims to be powerless to prevent the advertising of equipment that is clearly aimed at criminals. Why hype up the power of AI to detect scams, and the risks that criminals will use AI, if we are going to pretend that no intelligent person can tell if the equipment shown in these adverts will be used for crime?
Google has spent a lot of money buying influence with governments, regulators and anti-scam associations in order to shore up its reputation. But that does not mean they should be immune from criticism. YouTube continues to be the preferred social media channel for vendors of SMS blasters and IMSI-catchers because YouTube continues to permit content that other platforms, such as Facebook and X, have demonstrably torn down in the past. YouTube’s intransigence is doubly absurd when you notice how hard a different part of Google’s empire is trying to promote the anti-scam tech it is developing for Android phones.
There is no excuse for YouTube taking no action over an advert that depicts the same scenario as an actual crime that occurred in a Bangkok shopping mall. The new video you can see immediately below also shows somebody using an IMSI-catcher inside a shopping mall.
The following video depicts an IMSI-catcher being driven around residential areas of a town.
The final video shows how the technology can be used to identify an individual’s location within an apartment building.
Update 0930 UTC 27 March 2026: A video demonstrating SMS blaster capabilities has been added to the channel. You can see it below.
