Cocaine hidden in fertilizers or bananas. Layers of meth placed on solar panels. And almost 60 kilos of drugs hidden in a shipment of sex toys. It is evident that drug traffickers do not lack imagination.
As 404media reports, all of these drug seizures were enabled by Anom, an encrypted application used by the FBI to infiltrate organized crime and monitor the communications of thousands of criminals.
More than 12,000 devices affected
It all started in 2018 with the closure by the US agency of Phantom Secure, a company known for offering cryptophones, ultra-secure phones. Criminals then find themselves with no way to communicate without the police intercepting their messages.
As a result of this operation, a Phantom Secure salesperson and another from the Sky company proposed to the American authorities to develop a phone with its own encrypted messaging. Government agencies from several countries, including the United States, France and Australia, decided to join forces around Operation Trojan Shield.
On paper, the Anom phone is known to be very secure. The device contains only one application. Very popular among criminals, it allows you to send messages and make calls in a fully encrypted way. Only the owners of these phones can see these messages… at least in theory. In fact, he transmits all conversations to the FBI. The agency inserted a backdoor into the system to discreetly siphon the content of the exchanges.
From biker gangs, cartels, hitmen, the Australian-based Italian mafia to organized crime bosses in Albania – in total, the app has been installed on more than 12,000 devices.
Before shutting down the network in 2021, Anom collected tens of millions of messages. And, above all, it has made it possible to arrest hundreds of criminals and better understand the techniques of certain criminals for smuggling drugs, which is why some are especially crazy.
Private jets, sailing regattas and sex toys
According to documents from the US Department of Justice, recently obtained by 404media, Anom devices were, for example, able to closely observe the antics of Maximillian Rivkin, better known under the pseudonym Microsoft.
The drug trafficker would thus be involved in the trafficking of hundreds of kilos of cocaine between South America and Spain. To transport the drugs, he sailed on a boat during a sailing regatta in 2020. “The trip will be masked by other boats and will sail to the Caribbean,” the documents state. In another operation, drug trafficker “Microsoft” smuggled cocaine in juice bottles from Colombia to Europe.
For his part, Hakan Ayik, an Australian trafficker, allegedly sent 900 kilos of cocaine to Australia hiding it in shipments of scrap metal. The two men were later arrested by Turkish authorities.
Dutch traffickers smuggled cocaine using private planes. “Look, in the future we can easily transport 20 tons a month,” says one message. Another case involves the case of a Comanchero motorcycle gang. Another was a user who went even further by trying to hide drugs on a sailboat, in shipments of bananas or fertilizers.
In September 2020, a group of drug traffickers smuggled a shipment of cocaine into Australia. Thanks to Anom, the authorities searched the shipment and discovered almost 60 kilograms of drugs “hidden in 21 boxes of sex toys.”
The documents also detail extreme violence committed by some Anom phone users. “I even hit him three times with a gun and blood flowed from his head almost a meter high, at the rhythm of his heart (this scene was really funny),” can be read in one of the messages in the application.
In total, authorities have arrested 800 criminals in 16 countries thanks to Anom. It is the largest covert operation ever carried out.
This is not the first time that authorities have used this strategy to take down criminal networks. The integration of backdoors into messaging systems is regularly discussed. Last March, that was the objective of the reform of the Drug Trafficking Law. Faced with numerous criticisms and concerns, the National Assembly finally decided not to end the encryption of messaging services such as Whatsapp or Signal.
Source: BFM TV
