The Toronto Police Service (TPS) has announced the arrest of three men and seizure of ‘several’ SMS blasters. This is the first time that any police force in North America has reported arrests for the use of rogue base stations to send fraudulent SMS messages.
Two of the men were arrested in March at residences in Markham and Hamilton, two districts within the Toronto metropolitan area. SMS blasters and other evidence were seized at the same time. A third man turned himself into police last week. The three suspects are:
- Dafeng Lin, 27, of Hamilton, who has been charged with 22 crimes;
- Junmin Shi, 25, of Markham, who has been charged with 15 crimes; and
- Weitong Hu, 21, of Markham, who has been charged with 7 crimes.
Both Lin and Shi have been charged with ‘mischief endangering life’ as well as multiple counts of fraud. The charges against Hu are less severe although they include one count of identity fraud. The apparent threat to life appears to be a way for the Canadian authorities to bolster the charge sheets by arguing that the interruption of a mobile phone’s connection to a genuine network means the user is endangered during the period they are unable to call emergency services.
Police were alerted to the presence of an SMS blaster in downtown Toronto during November 2025. Further network disruption was reported in various parts of Greater Toronto during subsequent months. Investigators calculated that the SMS blaster connected to ‘tens of thousands’ of mobile devices during this period. The device was carried by a vehicle. However, the police provided few details about the modus operandi of this gang. There was no description of the content of the SMS messages sent and no explanation for why the gang would possess several SMS blasters if they only used one at a time. TPS took a tight-lipped approach to their media briefing by emphasizing warnings to the public about the risk of clicking on hyperlinks in SMS messages rather than discussing the details of the specific case. This contrasts with much more open disclosure by Asian police forces that also have far greater experience of tackling SMS blasters.
It was especially strange that TPS chose to supply journalists with a photograph of an SMS blaster from a case in the UK rather than sharing any photographs of the equipment they seized in Toronto. The justification for this decision was that the SMS blasters seized by the TPS were ‘uniquely built’ and hence photographs could not be shared for ‘safety reasons’. This sounds like an implausible argument to me. North American websites and social media platforms are replete with photographs and instructions for how to build IMSI-catchers and other radio devices that interfere with mobile phone connections. Furthermore, smishing occurs within the context of organized crime syndicates that also possess the phishing websites, mules and money laundering capabilities necessary to gather personal data and then use it to raid the accounts of victims. Canadians are sensitive about racial stereotyping but regular readers of SMS blaster crime stories on Commsrisk will draw their own conclusions about whether Lin, Shi and Hu might have had connections to organized crime. It is fanciful to suppose that some random member of the public might see a police photograph of an SMS blaster and then be inspired to build their own.
This case has been added to the SMS blaster map on the Global Fraud Dashboard, as also reproduced below. We maintain the most comprehensive and up-to-date map of all reports of SMS blasters being used worldwide by running automated daily AI-powered multilingual searches and then corroborating the results with credible sources. The map helps to illustrate how the use of SMS blasters for crime has spread from East to West. In all likelihood, there are SMS blasters operating in many of the countries that are still white on the map, but they remain unfound because of a lack of teamwork between telcos and police. Zoom in and click the dots on the map to read information about each documented case and hence to observe the similarity of methods used by criminals operating SMS blasters in countries that are geographically far apart.
