Global crime sting nets hundreds with planted encryption app to monitor communications

More than a week after taking the lid off the world's biggest sting operation against organized crime, police are still arresting criminals and closing global networks involved in money laundering, drugs and gun running.

Since the sting was made public on June 7, more than 1,000 people have been arrested and millions of dollars, luxury cars and yachts have been confiscated, and an estimated 32 tons of drugs seized globally.

Dubbed "Operation Trojan Shield/Greenlight" the sting was the brainchild of agents from the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Australian Federal Police more than three years ago.

As the operation started to gain momentum, police forces from 16 countries including the European Union's law enforcement agency, Europol, joined the operation.

In many ways the story could have come straight from the pages of a John Grisham crime thriller.

The plot was simple: police plant a communications app on the dark web, convince criminals that it is safe to use, sit back and monitor the grubby global network of organized crime.

At a press conference in San Diego in the US early last week, the FBI said it was behind the supposedly secure encrypted messaging app ANOM, which was secretly developed by the FBI and sold to organized crime networks on the dark web.

Earlier, the FBI took down two other encrypted messaging platforms, Canada-based Phantom Secure and Sky Global, accusing them of facilitating illegal activities through sales of customised end-to-end encrypted devices to criminal groups. 

Phantom Secure was shut down in 2018 while Sky Global was taken down earlier this year.

As criminals looked around for another network, ANOM was promoted as a safe and secure communications platform.

By the time the operation was wound up on June 7, more than 27 million messages had been intercepted, sent across 12,000 devices in 45 different languages. The intercepted communications from criminal gangs included messages pertaining to drugs shipments, money laundering, sale of weapons, and, in some cases, murder.

David Tuffley, a senior lecturer with the School of Information and Communication Technology at Griffith University in Australia's Queensland state, described the sting as the "most significant move against transnational organized crime in a decade". 

It is a landmark event "not only due to the numbers of arrests across 18 or more jurisdictions", but also because law enforcement was able to conduct a high-tech intelligence gathering operation that remained undetected for three years, he told China Daily. 

The development, however, does not mean that it will put an end to criminal gangs using the dark web.

"The dark web will remain the go to place for people seeking to engage in illegal pursuits. It is likely that an alternative to ANOM is already being used," Tuffley said.

That said, the sting has dealt a major blow to organized crime, at least for now.

In Australia, more than 300 criminals from bikies to mafia figures have been arrested, 21 murder plots thwarted, and A$35 million ($27 million) in cash and more than 3,000 kilograms of drugs have been seized.

Using ANOM, the FBI managed to infiltrate the phones of 300 criminal groups in more than 100 countries, Calvin Shivers of the FBI's criminal investigative division told reporters in The Hague on June 7.

One Australian underworld figure began distributing phones containing the app to his associates, believing the communications were secure because the phones had been customised to remove all capabilities, including voice and camera functions, apart from ANOM.

Reece Kershaw, Commissioner of the Australian Federal Police, said: "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."

"Digital sting tactics are tried and true," said Ashkan Soltani, an independent privacy researcher and former chief technologist at the Federal Trade Commission in the United States. 

The thing that is astounding is the scale of the operation, in terms of the number of people and geographically, he told the media on June 8.

It is not clear what exactly prompted the FBI and the other police agencies to reveal the operation.

Australian officials have indicated that they needed to act to disrupt some dangerous plots in motion, and also because of legal limits to timeframes for intercepting communications, according to media reports. 

"Encrypted criminal communications platforms have traditionally been a tool to evade law enforcement and facilitate transnational organized crime. 

"The FBI and our international partners continue to push the envelope and develop innovative ways to overcome these challenges and bring criminals to justice," the FBI's Shivers said in a statement.

Terry Goldsworthy, associate professor in criminology at Bond University, Queensland, said the operation has shown how Australia has become a destination of choice for transnational organized crime groups.

In its annual report, the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission had noted that around 70 percent of Australia's serious and organized criminal threats come from offshore or have strong offshore links.

"Organized crime syndicates target Australia, because sadly, the drug market is so lucrative. Australians are among the world's biggest drug takers," police commissioner Kershaw said, as per a commentary published in the news website The Conversation.