A high-ranking member of a violent Australian biker gang has his door kicked in by police.
Across the world in Germany, a group of contract killers is caught in a police ambush.
From Triad members in China to Sinaloa cartel members in the US, some of the world’s worst
criminals are being dragged away in handcuffs- and all because of a messaging app.
This was the sting of all stings, or as the FBI said, it was “unprecedented” in the
world of crime.
Some 800 people belonging to the highest echelons of global organized crime spanning 18 different
nations found themselves in handcuffs.
At the time of writing, this is likely just the start of bigger things to come.
The FBI, along with cops all over Europe and the Australian police had been tracking the
goings-on of 300 organized crime groups in 90 countries, not to mention being privy to
what they called “high-level public corruption”.
But before we go any further, let’s look at how this started.
As you know, if you want to move tons of drugs and weapons around the world you need a kind
of social network, but talking about shipping millions of dollars worth of cocaine to Europe
via countries in Africa on Facebook or WhatsApp wouldn’t really work.
That’s why criminals use specially-made encrypted apps.
In the past, this has worked to some extent.
Occasionally, law enforcement finds out about these private networks.
Take for instance the Canadian company Phantom Secure.
It supplied phones that had been modified to provide the utmost security.
The company didn’t ask who its customers were, or at least that’s what it said when
the cops bashed down the front doors.
It was discovered that one of those customers was the Sinaloa Cartel in Mexico, among many
other criminal syndicates around the world.
The CEO of the company, Vincent Ramos, was arrested but refused to give police a backdoor
into the encrypted network.
This didn’t deter the cops, who later got hold of one of the developers.
Police had an idea, thinking, now there’s a drought of such secure networks in the world,
why don’t we get this developer on our side.
You see, he was already working on the next totally secure network for another company.
That network was called Anom.
Along with the Australian Federal Police, the FBI came up with a plan.
According to reports, the two agencies came up with this idea while drinking a few beers
with each other.
They said why not secretly distribute this developer’s new technology and track it?
They paid him $120,000 and he didn’t have to go to prison, or at least he got reduced
time.
His name of course remains a mystery, otherwise, he’d have some of the world’s most dangerous
people on his back.
So, now that they had the technology they just had to get criminal organizations to
use the phones.
Those phones were pretty much useless, except for the fact they had on them a calculator
app.
This was actually an encrypted messaging service in disguise.
Once the user plugged in a code to the calculator, they could send messages and photos knowing,
or at least thinking, that law enforcement would never see them.
And boy, as you’ll see, they pretty much sent everything through those phones.
This operation, called “Operation Trojan Shield” officially started in 2018, but
of course, the police wanted to give the criminals enough time to really put themselves in it.
They also needed what they called “criminal influencers” to spread the word that a new
network was out, and it was safe.
One of them was an Australian drug kingpin named Hakan Ayik.
He’s now a marked man because he was one of the people that vouched for the phones
after he’d been duped into taking some by undercover agents.
He’s now apparently living the life of luxury somewhere in Turkey, although police have
said he is “best off handing himself into us” since a lot of people will likely want
him dead.
In order to buy one of the phones, you had to know someone in the game and then pay the
syndicate that was supplying them.
Things just snowballed from there.
The more high-profile criminals that used them the more trusted the phones seemed, and
by the time 2019 rolled around they were used all over the world by people belonging to
Mexican cartels, various European mafias, and powerful Asian crime syndicates.
What the users of the phones didn’t know is that law enforcement had the master key
to the encryption, so for years investigators read messages that discussed some of the most
serious crimes on the planet.
We are talking about the trafficking of explosives and countless weapons, about the trafficking
of tons and tons of narcotics, and also about who was in the firing line to get whacked.
At first, only 50 phones were distributed in Australia, but soon they started selling
like hotcakes.
When the sting happened, almost 12,000 phones were being used by 300 transnational criminal
organizations in 90 countries.
27 million messages had been intercepted comprising 45 languages.
This is what the Australian Federal Police Commissioner said about what they were reading
on a regular basis: “We have been in the back pockets of organized
crime.
All they talk about is drugs, violence, hits on each other, innocent people who are going
to be murdered, a whole range of things.”
To give you some examples, at one point someone sent a photograph.
In it was “hundreds of tons of cocaine that were concealed in shipments of fruit.”
It seems this shipment wasn’t taken by the authorities.
Another photo showed hundreds of kilos of cocaine nicely packaged with a Batman label.
One of the many messages read, “There is 2kg put inside French diplomatic sealed envelopes
out of Bogota.”
The message then explained that the Colombians could send 2kg a week every week and they
wanted 50 percent of the profits.
Another example conversation was between the names Real G and Ironman.
The former said, “South side asked what the prices are in Hong Kong per piece.”
Piece meant kilogram.
These kinds of messages led to drug confiscations, such as the 613 kilos of cocaine that was
on its way from Ecuador to Belgium hidden in cans of tuna.
When the tuna company was busted, another 1,523 kilos of cocaine was found, also headed
to Belgium.
In fact, four tons (four thousand kilos) of cocaine was intercepted.
After the arrests were made, the confiscations included: 8 tons of cocaine, 22 tons of cannabis
and resin, 2 tons of amphetamine and methamphetamine, as well as six tons of chemicals used to make
drugs.
On top of that, police seized 250 firearms, 55 luxury vehicles, an unreported amount of
cryptocurrencies, and almost $200 million in cash.
The users of the phones were so sure their privacy was covered that they didn’t really
try very hard to use any kind of code.
Police even discovered how criminals did “dry runs” which were basically sending containers
without the narcotics in them just to see how fast things happened and if there were
problems with customs.
Knowing that cops had so many organized crime figures in their hands and they were preventing
untold amounts of illegal drugs from getting to their destinations, you might wonder why
they decided in 2021 to swoop down and arrest all the names they had.
This was the FBI’s explanation, “This was an ideal time to take it down.
We decided, based on the amount of crime that was occurring, the threats to life, it was
time to get these criminals off the street.”
The agency said that during the years the operation had been going, police in various
countries had managed to “mitigate” threats to life, meaning they somehow prevented the
murders from happening.
At the time of the arrests, 10 people in Sweden were apparently on the kill list.
155 people were arrested in that country, while 60 people in Germany and 49 people in
Belgium were also arrested.
200 folks in Australia got that early morning call from the cops, too.
Spain and Serbia also saw a lot of arrests, but as you know, the number of people who
used the app was huge.
Even though this is a massive bust, it won’t put a too large dent in the distribution of
drugs around the world.
The Anon app was said to be used by a small number of organized crime members, especially
when you consider how many there actually are.
Australian Police said there are many more similar technologies out there they just don’t
yet know about…or maybe they don’t know about them.
Now you need to watch, “Cocaine vs Heroin - Which Drug is More Dangerous (Drug Addiction)?”
Or, have a look at, “Incredible Story of British Stock Broker Who Became A Drug Kingpin
In United States.”