The federal investigation into the sprawling telecommunication system hidden in multiple locations in and around New York City that was uncovered last week continues to expand, with investigators reportedly discovering another 200,000 SIM cards.

Citing unnamed law enforcement sources, ABC News this week reported that agents with Homeland Security Investigations found the SIM cards at a site in New Jersey, doubling the 100,000 SIM initially discovered along with at least 300 servers, all spread out within a 35-mile radius of the United Nations headquarters in New York City.

The discovery raises the number of places – including apartments and vacant offices – where the equipment has been found in and near the city to at least six.

The SIM cards and servers found were capable of disrupting telecommunications in New York City, including being able to send 30 million anonymous and encrypted text messages every minute, a rate that could translate into sending a text message to every cell phone in the country in 12 minutes, according to federal officials.

Such capabilities could have disabled cell phone towers and disrupted everything from regular communications to emergency services, such as EMT and police dispatches.

Possible DDoS Capabilities

The bad actors behind the rogue telecom network also could have used the infrastructure to launch distributed denial-of-services (DDOS) attacks by overloading communications networks and making it impossible for legitimate traffic to get through.

The SIM farms were discovered the same week that more than 150 officials from countries around the globe were gathering in New York City for the United Nations General Assembly.

Don Mihalek, a former Secret Service agent who now is a contributor to ABC News, told the new network that “the potential threat these data centers pose to the public could include shutting down critical resources that the public needs, like the 911 system, or potentially impacting the public’s ability to communicate everything, including business transactions.”

Links to China, Criminal Organizations

Investigators with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Secret Service have said that the operation was well-funded and well-organized, and that there are multiple foreign links to the hidden network, which reportedly was connected to known Chinese threat actors, though none have been publicly named.

There was evidence of communication links between foreign governments and people known to investigators to be members of organized crime gangs, drug cartels, and human trafficking operations, according to unnamed officials who have spoken to new organizations, including CBS News.

The network was uncovered in August during a larger Secret Service investigation that began in the spring after high-level government officials were victimized by swatting incidents – a harassment scheme where fraudulent calls are made to emergency services that bring large numbers of law enforcement officers to the victim’s home – and threatening phone calls.

A Time-Consuming Investigation

Secret Service agents are combing through the hundreds of thousands of SIM cards that have been seized, a time-consuming process. One unnamed official told CBS News that each SIM has the same amount of data as a cell phone and that investigators were looking at every call, text, and search made on each one.

No arrests have been made. Matt McCool, special agent in charge of the Secret Service’s New York field office, told journalists last week that it couldn’t be “understated what this system is capable of doing. It can take down cell towers, so then no longer can people communicate. …. You can’t text message, you can’t use your cell phone. And if you coupled that with some sort of other event associated with UNGA [UN General Assembly] … it could be catastrophic to the city.”

McCool added that “it’d be unwise to think that there aren’t other networks out there being made in other cities in the United States.”