PJ Vogt

A new encrypted phone company, also catering to criminals, but with much more audacious visionaries behind it.

Startup founders with a plan unlike anything anyone had ever tried to pull off.

The name of this new company?

Anam's promise was that not only were they on your side, unlike their competition, they'd also give you a great phone.

A nice camera with tons of megapixels.

You can send emojis.

This turned out to be a winning combination.

Criminals, like everybody else, are human.

Suckers for the latest and greatest in new doodads.

Of course, while it's great to have a product with killer features, a phone can't sell itself.

Anom, like any startup, needed to acquire customers.

And it would use the same marketing strategy deployed by seemingly every online brand in the 2020s.

influencer marketing.

The influencers in this case, high-level criminals with reputations for excellence in lawbreaking.

The way Anam worked, if a criminal sold a phone to their felonious friend, they got a significant commission.

It was a way to grow the network, while at the same time ensuring the only people on Anam had been vetted by a fellow criminal.

So unlike, like, if I want to buy an iPhone, I'll go to the Apple store.

If I want to get an Anom phone, I would have to know someone through my existing criminal networks, and they're selling it.

It's sort of like Girl Scout cookies, right?

Hakan Ayyik is a very famous criminal in Australia.