A fake mobile base station in a moving car briefly drew nearby phones away from their legitimate network and sent phishing texts posing as police notices, according to Hungarian investigators. Police tracked the radio signal to Pécs, where they arrested a 27-year-old Chinese man in what Hungary’s National Bureau of Investigation (NNI) describes as the country’s first uncovered crime involving SMS Blaster technology.
The equipment didn’t just send deceptive messages. It also disrupted a mobile operator’s network. According to the police account, investigators identified nine victims who lost a combined 4,802,333 forints.
The investigation began in mid-July, when a Hungarian mobile operator detected network abnormalities that kept changing location and couldn’t be explained by a conventional technical fault. Subscribers also reported suspicious texts displaying the sender name “RENDORSEG”, the Hungarian label for police.
Those messages claimed that the recipient’s vehicle had been involved in a traffic violation in Budapest. They asked recipients to open a link to view the details and resolve the matter. The link led to a phishing page, not the police’s official online administration service.
After analysing the data, investigators and the operator’s specialists suspected a Fake eNB, or counterfeit cellular base station. The SMS Blaster method uses portable radio equipment to impersonate a genuine base station. Its deceptive signal can cause nearby phones to disconnect briefly from their operator’s network and connect to the fake station instead.
While connected, phones may lose access to their operator’s services or have that access restricted. The person operating the equipment can then send bulk messages to those devices. So the method does double duty: it enables phishing and it can interfere with the normal operation of an electronic communications network.
Between July 13 and 22, the operator recorded 88,235 network events associated with connections to the fake base station. That isn’t a count of victims, or even necessarily of individual phones: the same device could appear in the records more than once.
Investigators from the NNI’s department for combating cybercrime brought in several specialist partners to locate the radio-frequency signal. Measurements suggested that the equipment was travelling in a car. After confirming this, investigators organised an operation within a few days, using data from mobile units and measuring stations to track its movements.
On July 22, they first detected the signal in Budapest, then tracked it south along the M6 motorway and into Baranya County. Officers eventually stopped the vehicle in Pécs and arrested its driver. On the back seat, they found radio equipment suspected of being capable of operating a fake mobile base station and transmitting fraudulent SMS messages.
Police formally suspected the man of the felony of interfering with an information system or data involving a public-service operation and took him into custody. A court subsequently ordered his pretrial detention.
Over the two months before the police account, specialists examined the seized radio equipment and electronic devices to establish how the technology worked. Investigators also determined the number of victims and the total financial loss during that time.
Based on the available evidence, investigators believe the suspect had no accomplice in Hungary. They say he transported and operated the fake base station and handled connections to the devices himself. Authorities are still investigating possible foreign connections and have contacted international organisations and overseas counterparts to establish the full network behind the operation.
