Private jets and crypto backdoors

Hey there, Joseph here. I’ll get to the good stuff immediately: my book about the largest sting operation ever, DARK WIRE, in which the FBI secretly ran its own encrypted phone company for criminals, is coming out in paperback! It has all new cover art, an updated epilogue with a bunch more details, and 404 Media subscribers get 20 percent off if they buy a copy before launch day on November 11. Use code WIRE20 at my publisher’s site here.

Now for today’s story: someone has posted a bunch of sealed U.S. Department of Justice documents online that reveal even more details about this operation. This is stuff even I hadn’t seen until very recently, and shows some of the really wild drug traffickers and schemes the FBI followed. I verified the documents. Read the article about the new documents below, and pick up your copy of DARK WIRE if you want the full story of Anom told through the eyes of the agents and the criminals who were there. Thank you!

Private jets loaded with cocaine landing at an airport in Germany. A trafficker stuffing a racing sail boat with drugs and entering a tournament to blend in with other racers before speeding off. Vacuum-sealed layers of methamphetamine inside solar panels. And nearly 60 kilograms of drugs hidden inside a shipment of sex toys. 

These are just some of the examples included in a cache of leaked U.S. Department of Justice documents the FBI used to convince a judge to let them continue harvesting messages from Anom. Anom was an encrypted phone and app the FBI secretly took over, backdoored, and ran for years as a tech company popular with organized crime around the world. The Anom operation, dubbed Trojan Shield, was the largest sting operation ever.

The documents provide more insight into the sorts of criminals swept up in the FBI’s investigation, and give behind-the-scenes detail on how exactly the FBI obtained legal approval for such a gigantic, and to some controversial, operation. The leaked documents include the original court orders from Lithuania, which assisted the FBI in collecting the data from Anom devices worldwide, and the FBI’s supporting documentation for those court orders. The documents were not supposed to be released publicly, but someone posted them anonymously online.

“Like I said this Turbo crew are the Pablo Escobar of this time in that area and got full control there,” one message written by an alleged drug trafficker included in the documents reads.

404 Media showed sections of the documents to people with direct knowledge of the operation who said they appeared authentic. Finnish outlet Yle reported on some of their contents at the end of September, but 404 Media is publishing copies of the documents themselves.

In 2018 the FBI shut down an encrypted phone company called Phantom Secure. In the wake of that, a seller from Phantom Secure and another popular company called Sky offered U.S. authorities their own, in-development encrypted device: Anom. The FBI then took Anom under its wing and oversaw a backdoor placed into the app. This involved adding a “ghost” contact to every group chat and direct message across the platform. The operation started in Australia as a beta test, before expanding to Europe, South America, and other parts of the world, sweeping up messages from cartels to biker gangs to hitmen to money launderers.

A screenshot from the documents.

Some of the documents are formal requests for continued assistance from the U.S. to Lithuania and spell out the sort of criminal activity the FBI has seen on the Anom platform. Several sections name specific and well-known drug traffickers. One is Maximillian Rivkin, also known as “Microsoft.” As I chronicled in my book about Anom, Rivkin was a devilishly creative drug trafficker, constantly making new schemes to smuggle cocaine or other narcotics. The new documents say Rivkin’s Serbia-based organized crime group was involved in the trafficking of hundreds of kilograms of cocaine between South America and Spain. To move the drugs, the group sailed a boat during a November 2020 regatta, a sailing race, “where their travel will be obscured by other boats and sail to the Caribbean,” the documents say. Around two or three weeks later, the boat would then return to Europe with the cocaine, before being dropped off the coast of Spain where another member of the group would pick it up, the documents add.

In another instance Rivkin’s group smuggled cocaine base within juice bottles from Colombia to Europe, according to the documents. In my book, I found Rivkin planned to do something similar with energy drinks.

These sorts of audacious, over-the-top drug smuggling operations were a common sight on Anom, according to my own review of hundreds of thousands of Anom text messages between drug traffickers I previously obtained. The new documents also specifically name Hakan Ayik, who was the head of the so-called Aussie Cartel, which controlled as much as a third of all drug importation into Australia, and who at one point was Australia’s most wanted criminal. Ayik discussed sending a massive 900 kilograms of cocaine through Malaysia to Australia concealed within shipments of scrap metal, according to the documents.

“Can you give me roughly the coordinates where’s the better place to meet outside Indonesian waters,” Ayik, using the moniker Oscar, said in one of the messages included in the documents.

Both Rivkin and Ayik were later arrested by Turkish authorities. Ayik was also known as the “encryption king,” likely due to his prolific selling of encrypted communication devices to organized criminals.

Other examples in the documents include a Dutch drug trafficking group involving a man called Guiliano Domenico Azzarito. That group smuggled cocaine between South America and Europe with private jet flights into small and medium sized airports the group controls, according to the documents. “Look we can move 20 tons easily every month from here in the future,” one message said.

Another describes Baris Tukel, a high-ranking Comanchero motorcycle gang member who was later charged by the U.S. for helping to spread Anom devices, discussing plans to hide methamphetamine and MDMA in marble tiles. In another case, a drug trafficker with the username RealG discussed smuggling drugs on a sailboat, inside shipments of bananas and hides, and cocaine base hidden inside fertilizer.

In September 2020, a drug trafficking group smuggled a shipment of cocaine and methamphetamine from the UK, through Singapore, to Australia, according to the documents. Authorities later searched the shipment, and found nearly 60 kilograms of drugs “concealed within 21 boxes of sex toys,” the documents say.

A screenshot from the documents.

The messages included in the document also detail some of the extreme violence Anom users engaged in. Simon Bekiri, a Comanchero member, discussed an assault against a rival gang, according to the documents. “I even pistol whipped him 3 times and blood was squirting out of his head almost a meter high in time with his heartbeat (That part was really funny),” one of the messages reads. “But when you say I pistol whipped him, shot him, bashed him and then took off in his car I’ll admit it does sound violent.”

These examples were used to help convince a Lithuanian judge to allow local authorities to continue providing the FBI with Anom messages. In an unusual legal workaround, instead of running the Anom collection server in the U.S., which may have created more legal headaches, the Department of Justice arranged for it to be run in Lithuania. Lithuanian authorities then provided a regular stream of collected Anom messages to the FBI. In all, Anom grew to 12,000 devices and the FBI collected tens of millions of messages before shutting the network down in June 2021.

404 Media first revealed in September 2023 Lithuania was the so-called “third country” that harvested the messages for the FBI. The Department of Justice has never formally acknowledged Lithuania’s role despite the leaked documents further corroborating 404 Media’s reporting.