[The operation was revealed Tuesday in part because a warrant in a third country to forward messages to U.S. authorities expired June 7, the filing said. Acting U.S. attorney in San Diego Randy Grossman announced Tuesday that his office had charged 17 foreign nationals with distributing thousands of encrypted communication devices to criminal syndicates. Eight of them, he said, had been arrested. The rest are considered fugitives.]
By Rachel Pannett and Michael Birnbaum
An international coalition of law
enforcement officials announced they had ensnared alleged criminals around the
world after duping them into using phones loaded with an encrypted messaging
app controlled by the FBI.
The audacious effort — led by the
FBI, Australian police and a host of European law enforcement agencies — gave
the officials a window into the conversations of criminal networks, as people
planned illegal drug shipments, plotted robberies and put out contracts for
killings.
Law enforcement officials — some of
whom Tuesday could barely contain their glee — announced they had arrested more
than 800 people and gained an unprecedented understanding into the functioning
of modern criminal networks that would keep fueling investigations long past
the coordinated international raids that took place in recent days.
The effort was “one of the largest
and most sophisticated law enforcement operations to date in the fight against
encrypted criminal activities,” Jean-Philippe Lecouffe, the deputy executive
director for operations of Europol, the agency that coordinates police activity
among the 27 European Union countries, said in a news conference in The Hague.
[How
America’s surveillance networks helped the FBI catch the Capitol mob]
For nearly three years, law
enforcement officials have been virtually sitting in the back pocket of some of
the world’s top alleged crime figures. Custom cellphones, bought on the black
market and installed with the FBI-controlled platform, called Anom, circulated
and grew in popularity among criminals as high-profile crime entities vouched
for its integrity.
The FBI in the past has dismantled
encrypted platforms used by criminals to communicate, and infiltrated others.
This time, it decided to market an encrypted app of its own to target organized
crime, drug trafficking and money laundering activities across the globe. The
FBI effort was aided by a paid collaborator who had previously marketed other
encrypted devices to members of the global criminal underworld.
A breakthrough came after
Australian police met with the FBI in 2018 over a couple of beers, according to officials. The Australians then built a
technical capability to access, decrypt and read communications on the FBI’s
platform.
The users believed their Anom
devices were secured by encryption. They were — but every message was also fed
directly to law enforcement agents.
“Essentially, they have handcuffed
each other by endorsing and trusting Anom and openly communicating on it — not
knowing we were watching the entire time,” Australian Federal Police
Commissioner Reece Kershaw said.
[What
is Anom, and how did law enforcement use it to arrests hundreds in a global
sting?]
The global operation, known as
Special Operation Ironside in Australia and Trojan Shield in the United States
and Europe, has allegedly exposed criminals linked to South American drug cartels,
triad groups in Asia and criminal syndicates based in the Middle East and
Europe. A total of 17 countries took part in the effort.
Officials said raids in those
countries in recent days had impounded more than eight tons of cocaine, 22 tons
of marijuana and hashish, two tons of methamphetamine and amphetamine, 250
firearms, 55 luxury vehicles and more than $48 million in cash and
cryptocurrencies.
The operation has “struck a heavy
blow against organized crime,” Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison said,
“not just in this country but one that will echo around organized crime around
the world.”
More than 9,000 law enforcement
officers were involved, sifting through 27 million messages that were sent via
the app over the 18 months of the operation. The alleged criminals used the app
like an illicit WhatsApp or text message system, communicating in 45 languages
to trade details of their activities, officials said. The countries with the most
users were Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Australia and Serbia, according to
an FBI filing in a federal court that was unsealed late Monday.
“To give you an idea of the
magnitude of our penetration, we were able to actually see photographs of
hundreds of tons of cocaine that were concealed in shipments of fruit. We were
able to see hundreds of kilos of cocaine that were concealed in canned goods,”
Calvin Shivers, assistant director from FBI’s Criminal Investigative Division,
told reporters in The Hague. “The results are staggering.”
Demand for the devices soared as
law enforcement officials shut down older, rival encrypted networks, including
one called EncroChat that was dismantled in July 2020 and another, Sky Global,
that was targeted in March. Before March, there were about 3,000 users of the
FBI-penetrated devices. Afterward, the clientele nearly tripled, the FBI court
filing said.
The operation was revealed Tuesday
in part because a warrant in a third country to forward messages to U.S.
authorities expired June 7, the filing said. Acting U.S. attorney in San Diego
Randy Grossman announced Tuesday that his office had charged 17 foreign
nationals with distributing thousands of encrypted communication devices to
criminal syndicates. Eight of them, he said, had been arrested. The rest are
considered fugitives.
“The supreme irony here is that the
very devices that these criminals were using to hide from law enforcement were
actually beacons for law enforcement,” Grossman said in a statement. “We aim to
shatter any confidence in the hardened encrypted device industry with our
indictment and announcement that this platform was run by the FBI.”
Users typically pay between $1,500
and $2,000 for a six-month service plan for such devices, and are typically
able to gain access only by being greenlighted by a current user, the filing
said, a step that builds user trust. At a news conference to announce the
operation, U.S. officials said that while the encryption technology has benefits,
the operation shows how it can be exploited by nefarious actors.
“Encryption also allows the
criminals to operate in the same safe, secure environment, hiding their
communications in a cloak of secrecy,” said Suzanne Turner, the special agent
in charge of the FBI in San Diego.
Global law enforcement officials
got lucky with Anom early on, after an alleged member of the Australian
criminal underworld, Hakan Ayik, one of the country’s most-wanted criminals,
praised the devices to his associates and encouraged their uptake.
“He was one of the coordinators of
this particular device. So he’s essentially set up his own colleagues,”
Kershaw, the Australian police commissioner, told reporters Tuesday, saying
that he should turn himself in, “given the threat that he faces.”
Officials described a wide-ranging,
disruptive effort that they hoped would deliver a serious setback to criminal
networks in their countries. The U.S. court filing offered details of the
interactions authorities witnessed on the app: intricate haggling over the
costs of distributing drugs, photos of the ways drugs were hidden, friendly
interactions between alleged criminals.
“There is 2 kg put inside french
diplomatic sealed envelopes” out of Bogotá, Colombia, one user wrote in March
2020. “'Only issue is that COL takes 50/4 Partners including yourself will need
to split other 50.”
The filing explained that Colombian
distributors would take 50 percent of the profits from the cocaine shipments
hidden in the diplomatic pouch, while four other people split the rest.
In Australia, police used
information as the operation was underway to seize 3.7 tons of drugs, 104
weapons and some $35 million in cash. During that time, the alleged criminals
had no idea why their drugs were being seized and their plots foiled, police
said.
Police said they disrupted a number
of possible homicides, including one plot involving plans to shoot a family of
five at a cafe.
In Sweden, which has struggled with
drug networks in recent years, a top official said authorities had “performed
one of the most important strikes ever” against violent crime and drug
networks.
The official, Linda Staaf, head of
intelligence for the Swedish Police Authority, said that in recent days, 70
people had been arrested, “many of them persons with essential roles and heavy
influence on the drug market: those who instigate murders and violence by
shootings and explosions right in the middle of Swedish society.” U.S.
authorities said that among those arrested were six corrupt law enforcement
officers.
A top Dutch police official reveled
in what she said was the app’s success.
“It has a good reputation among
criminals. They mutually promote it as the platform you should use for its
absolute reliability,” said Jannine van den Berg, chief commissioner of the
national unit of the Dutch police. “But nothing was further from the truth.”
Birnbaum reported from Riga,
Latvia. Matt Zapotosky in Washington contributed to this report.
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