Chapter 1: What is the story behind the AN0M phone?
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When I started out in radio before the podcast boom, the big semi-recent invention everyone was still talking about was just editing audio on computers. The veterans who I learned from loved to talk about how just a few years before, interviews were still being recorded onto actual physical tape.
And they'd tell me how they used to edit that tape by cutting it with a razor blade and sticky taping it back together. It had all been so different, so much less efficient, so recently. They were still marveling at it. For me, a few years later, the equivalent change was auto-transcriptions. The weeks of my life spent typing up transcripts of other people's interviews or my own, just gone.
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Chapter 2: How did Phantom Secure influence the criminal phone market?
Hey, Joseph, how are you doing over there? All good, all good. A little bit of a sore throat from talking constantly. I'm going to get so sick of my voice.
You're going to get book tour fever. This is Joseph Cox. He just published a book called Dark Wire. Joseph's a tech reporter, but he's not one of the normal ones. His work won't tell you how many more camera lenses to expect on the next iPhone. He does not dissect the latest outrageous tweet from Elon Musk. His interests lie elsewhere. And what's your relationship with the criminal underworld?
Kind of close, actually, weirdly. I've carved a niche in my journalism career by speaking to criminals, essentially. And that could be drug traffickers. It could be cyber criminals, hackers especially. And I was always interested where we would read press releases about hacking operations or law enforcement campaigns. And you would never hear from the other side.
So I made a habit of, I want to go talk to the people with hands on keyboards, is what I say. I want to talk to the hackers. I want to talk to the people using strange technology. So I've, for years, approached it from the crime side of things. And they'll talk to you some of the time, at least.
Yeah, I think when you meet people sort of where they are, of course, for war reporting, that would be actually going to the scene of the conflict. For me, that's like downloading the very particular weird apps that these criminals use. They respect you jumping through those hoops.
Joseph's internet is one where ingenious criminals are constantly inventing apps and gadgets, sometimes giving themselves a significant edge against the cops they play cat and mouse with. But in all his years covering this world, nothing he'd seen prepared him for the story of this one new kind of criminal smartphone. It had transformed the underworld so quickly and so thoroughly.
And in the aftermath of that transformation, Joseph feels sure we are living in a new world, one whose implications he thinks most of us have not yet begun to grapple with. But I'm getting ahead of myself. The story begins in a country with a much more active criminal underworld than I had ever known. Australia.
Law enforcement agencies in Australia are confronting a new high-tech weapon in their fight against organized crime. Criminal gangs are now using encrypted mobile phones.
This ABC News report is from about a decade ago. And it's about a trend that had swept through the criminal underworld. Encrypted mobile phone companies. The report explained how these phones worked by focusing on one company, popular at the time, called Phantom Secure.
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Chapter 3: What features made AN0M appealing to criminals?
It sells encrypted phones that are so secure even Australia's electronic spy agency can't crack their code.
So the Australian media actually showed one of the adverts from Phantom Secure. And there's a guy in a dress shirt doing his tie. There's a limousine with blacked out windows.
The company's clients appear to be international men of mystery involved in high-powered business deals.
So, like, looking at the ad, it looks like it's for fancy rich dudes who care about privacy. Who is this phone actually for?
This phone is actually for serious organized criminals, such as members of biker gangs who may assassinate one another, or even members of the Sinaloa drug cartel. They're not your normal business executives. A lot of serious organized criminal activity in Australia is controlled by the motorcycle gangs.
So you have the Comacheros, you have the Banditos, the Hells Angels as well, and they're all in a melting pot with their different motivations, different territory.
Three nomads were shot in Marrickville. The Hells Angels Petersham Clubhouse was firebombed. A Rebels member was killed. Bandidos and notorious ambushed each other. A shooting outside the Nomads Club near Penrith yesterday morning. The victim, an innocent newspaper deliveryman. Shotgun blasts from both sides of the car park left four Comancheros and two bandidos dead.
A schoolgirl was shot dead in the crossfire.
And in some cases, phantom secure phones were used to plan the hits between these rival groups.
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Chapter 4: Who was Hakan Ayik and what was his role with AN0M?
Which is a very cool little gadget. You know, I wish I could do that on my normal phone. It then had all of this other stuff, like you could send scrambled voice memos. So even if the cops managed to intercept it, the voice would be all garbled, and they wouldn't be able to tell who was actually talking. You could also redact images.
So if somebody's face was in there, you could then blur it, and again, the cops get the image, they're actually not going to know who's in there.
and probably most importantly it had this really powerful wipe system where if the phone fell into the wrong hands you know maybe a border cop seized it or another law enforcement official got hold of it you could tell a nom hey quick my phone is in the hands of the cops please wipe the device and they would do that and it would remove all data from the phone of course you know
iCloud and Apple, they have something similar, but you don't go to Apple and be like, hey, my phone's in the hands of the cops. Tim Cook isn't going to do that, as far as I know.
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.
It had all of these bells and whistles, which, while still being secure, showed that, hey, we don't have to have these sort of like sluggish cameras
cumbersome encrypted phones anymore we can have the phone of the 2020s with all of the cool features while still catering to our criminal clientele got it so it's both secure and like all the fun exciting advances in smartphones that we've all gotten completely used to and don't actually feel fun and exciting but it's like a criminally secure phone with features Yeah, exactly.
It brings them well into the 2020s. And criminals can now send, you know, their sunglasses emojis or their heart emojis while they're doing their multi-ton shipments of cocaine.
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.
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Chapter 5: How did the FBI infiltrate the AN0M network?
in australia the company got more demand for phones outside and especially in europe and sort of the key person behind that expansion was a drug trafficker called hakan ayik he is the head of the so-called aussie cartel which is a multi-billion dollar super cartel good evening and welcome to the program tonight we take you inside the hunt for australia's most wanted criminal
Hakan Ayyik is a very famous criminal in Australia. He's not the creator of Anam, we'll get to that later, but he's its most well-known user, an early adopter responsible for much of its success. He was even a system administrator on the network.
He's a rat-cunning, ruthless gangster who's made an eye-watering fortune in porting massive quantities of drugs into Australia.
You see pictures of Hakan Ayik, presumably from his own social media. Selfies. He's a jock, huge tattoo-covered chest, buzz cut, looks a little bit like Joe Rogan. Ayik in Australia had managed to pull something off that was pretty exceptional. He wasn't just running a single criminal organization, he was running a criminal network.
uniting different gangs in different countries to come together to make money.
He's teamed up with the Criminjeros and the Hells Angels, groups that would usually be killing each other if they were in the same room. They band together to basically put those differences aside and make a lot more money.
Hakanayik had been a devout user of Phantom Secure, and when it was shut down, he was very enthusiastic about its new successor.
Hakanayik gets very interested in Anom. On one side, he needs a secure device to continue to smuggle his drugs. On the other, if he can get in early when Anom is just growing, and maybe get a sizable share of the business, he can make an absolute ton of money selling the phones as well.
Drug traffickers have figured out that you don't just sell coke, you sell the phones that also power the trade of the cocaine as well. And what better ambassador for a nom than one of the world's top drug traffickers saying, hey, this phone is the real deal, so much so that I'm going to put my freedom and my safety behind it as well.
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Chapter 6: What was the impact of Operation Trojan Shield on crime?
He's getting a commission on selling phones. He's asking the people he works with to sell phones. What crimes is he using the phones to commit?
So, Microsoft, if you can think up a drug trafficking scheme, Microsoft has not only probably thought about it himself, he's probably done it as well. Microsoft has spoken about putting drugs inside energy drinks, using corrupt workers inside energy drink factories. He's talked about getting airstrips in Europe to deliver drugs. He's hidden cocaine inside tulips.
He's built amphetamine labs in the Swedish countryside. He's orchestrated drops of cocaine to speedboats in the middle of the ocean. Wow. Done that multiple times. They call that a James Bond job when they drive a speedboat. They throw it overboard and they catch the nets or the duffel bags or whatever. Yeah.
Microsoft is a prolific drug trafficker and a prolific user and, importantly, a seller of these phones, including Anom. He puts his entire business and trust basically into this one platform.
With Microsoft and others like him on board, Anom begins to dominate the international crime world, not just the Australian market. Joseph says that criminal networks these days are much more multinational than they once were, with cooperation between a drug cartel in one country and a distributor in another being fairly common.
But for this global village of lawbreakers to talk, they needed a secure way to do it.
And now, that was Anam. And it starts to spread in Colombia or then in Sweden and Denmark and Norway and Finland. So you have all of these influencers providing exceptional marketing to Anom. If Anom did not have those big names, those Ryan Reynolds, I guess, I don't know if Anom would really take off. And it absolutely did after that.
Akanyek, the muscly mastermind, and Microsoft, his nerdy underling, may have been the Ryan Reynoldses of Anom, but they were not the masterminds who had created it. The mastermind was actually an associate of theirs, a man known as AFKU. Where did AFKU get all the capital to start this? Probably would have been a good question to ask. But here's what people did know about AFKU.
Afgu was a longtime denizen of the criminal phone world. He'd actually even been involved for a bit in Anam's more primitive predecessor, Phantom Secure. And now, Afgu was moving the whole industry forward. As the months went on, Anom, just like a legit tech company, kept adding more features. Sometimes at the specific request of its biggest power user, Microsoft.
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Chapter 7: What ethical dilemmas arise from government surveillance of criminals?
In December 2020, Microsoft began to hit a biblical patch of bad luck.
The first major piece of bad luck for Microsoft is that Swedish police somehow find his amphetamine lab in the Swedish countryside. It turns out the cops followed one of his lab cooks who was making a switch of amphetamine in a shopping center car park. They follow him back and they discover this amphetamine lab.
And they do this really dramatic raid with two parallel SWAT teams going through two different entrances, striking simultaneously. They capture the cooks, basically red-handed, or I guess gloving, hand in glove, because he puts his hands up and he's covered in amphetamine. Hands on your backs! Hands on your backs! And that's the first bit of bad luck, and they seize all the drugs.
But more importantly, they seize the drugs, but of course they shut down the lab, and that's Microsoft's sort of drug infrastructure pushed out of the window. So that's very concerning.
With his lab destroyed, Microsoft is now down bad financially, which means he has to do more risky jobs in order to make his money back.
Microsoft continues doing odd jobs here and there. He's then trying to do another sort of twilight drop of cocaine in the ocean near Japan, and something happens where there's a combination of a lot of bad weather, and then also apparently the Japanese Navy get a tip-off that something is going on, and they raid the boat, and that operation falls apart as well. Finally,
he spins up another amphetamine smuggling operation. Like, okay, rather than building the lab, I'm just going to go to somebody I know who already has one, who can make it, and then I will smuggle it across Europe or wherever. And he does that. There's a seizure here or there. It's like, okay, the cost of doing business. But then again, again, and again,
the cops keep raiding his safe houses, even though it's a different safe house every time. And it's like, how the hell are the cops finding out where my drugs are every single time? And he's running out of money, especially because he operates on credit a lot, where he will sell drugs when they haven't actually arrived yet. So he's trying to balance his master spreadsheet while...
His drugs are all being seized and it's a complete mess. He ends up with these stress rashes all across his body. He's figuring out where his next sort of paycheck is going to be until eventually he basically emits defeat. And it's like, I'm out. I'm to zero. And he's gone from this incredibly prolific drug smuggler to like a mess, basically. And it's not just Microsoft who is losing shipments.
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Chapter 8: What is the future of encrypted communication for criminals?
And then, one summer day, a law enforcement agent on the other side of the world, in San Diego of all places, holds a surprise press conference.
Good morning. I am Randy Grossman. I'm the acting United States attorney for the Southern District of California. Welcome. Thank you for being here.
This U.S. attorney, looking quite pleased, stands at a podium in a municipal law enforcement press room. Yellow-looking veneer wood, bold blue curtains. Behind him, several other law enforcement officers, each wearing a fabric COVID mask. It's 2021. They're here to announce the many arrests that are being made in the US and simultaneously in other countries.
This is part of a worldwide law enforcement operation that has resulted in hundreds of arrests for drug trafficking, money laundering, firearms violations, and crimes of violence. These international arrests and the U.S. charges were possible because of a San Diego-based FBI investigation like none other in history.
For the first time, the FBI developed and operated its own hardened encrypted device company called ANOM, A-N-O-M.
So the phone company for criminals was being run by a United States law enforcement agency, by the FBI.
The U.S. government was the secret venture capitalist and puppet master and manager of Anom for its entire existence.
The worldwide implications of this investigation are staggering. In total, the criminals sold more than 12,000 ANAN encrypted devices and services to more than 300 criminal syndicates operating in over 100 different countries.
Oops. After a short break, how the FBI came to start a criminal phone company preferred by the discerning international drug smuggler, and what the feds found on history's most ambitious wiretap. Welcome back to the show. Anam, the phone company used almost exclusively by criminals, designed exclusively for criminals, was a multi-year, very expensive FBI project.
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