It does seem like the sort of PR-rewrite for a press release that results in distances measured in football fields.
Looking at a map, a 35 mile as-the-crow-flies (and as the cell network signal flies) radius of the U.N. Secretariat building almost gets one to Lake Hopatcong, New Jersey, in one direction and past Stamford, Connecticut, in another.
It reminds me of those "how to promote yourself" things about say turning "did routine performance optimizations on the website" into "saved the company $ZZZ million" and such.
It's worth highlighting that that link suggests this may be linked to foreign states rather than just garden-variety organized crime ("...early analysis indicates cellular communications between nation-state threat actors...").
"Concentrated within this 10000 km² area" sounds not nearly as impressive. Granted, "concentrated within 35 miles" sounds already rather dilute when talking about mobile phones.
A "35-mile radius of the United Nations headquarters" includes literally all of New York City and then some, making the supposed connection to the UN meeting extremely tenuous.
This looks exactly like a "SIM farm" operation, which rents out access to real mobile numbers, usually for the purpose of spamming or fraud. Yet there's no mention of this possibility.
> "several locations within a 35-mile radius of the United Nations headquarters"
That's the entirety of New York City!
edit to add: This very weird part was actually lifted from the USSS press release,
> "These devices were concentrated within 35 miles of the global meeting of the United Nations General Assembly now underway in New York City."
https://www.secretservice.gov/newsroom/releases/2025/09/us-s... ("U.S. Secret Service dismantles imminent telecommunications threat in New York tristate area")