Part 3: Criminal ‘influencers’ who took the AFP and FBI bait by using the AN0M app

PART 3: Aussie cops convinced “influencers” who could get others to use the AN0M app where their secret networks were finally exposed.

PART 3: Aussie cops convinced “influencers” who could get others to use the AN0M app where their secret networks were finally exposed.

INFLUENCERS AND EMOJIS

Some mainstream products have the Kardashians. Others are promoted by impossibly gorgeous models or the biggest names in world sport.

Like any decent 21st century product, AN0M needed one hell of a marketing strategy – complete with celebrity endorsement.

These influencers, though, were unlikely to be on a red carpet any time soon.

With their Silicon Valley hats on, the international team realised organic growth and spreading the devices through the underworld via word of mouth from authentic criminal sources, was crucial to success.

They identified “influencers’’ – prominent members of the underworld – who they believed would be influential in getting other crooks to switch to AN0M.

One of those influencers was on Australian shores – let’s call him Mafia Man.

Police allege he was a senior member of the feared ‘Ndrangheta. Others were selected as they had strong links to a who’s who of global mayhem – Comanchero, Hells Angels and Lone Wolf bikies, South American drug cartels and Albanian organised crime.

Another influencer was Hakan Ayik, the former Sydney bikie who had fled to Turkey a decade ago, and who police believed was directing and organising drug imports worth hundreds of millions of dollars into Australia and other countries.

Australia’s Mafia Man can be revealed for the first time after he was discovered during Operation Ironside. Picture: News Corp Australia

In the words of Gaughan, AN0M was “being sponsored by a couple of really good crooks who are basically saying that it’s impregnable’’.

Or, as AFP Superintendent Jared Taggart said: “It’s like having the Rock sponsoring your gym.”

Police haven’t explained how they got the first devices to Ayik and Mafia Man.

It was slow at first – just five devices were placed into the market to test the waters – but police allowed their business to grow organically.

“We weren’t actively out there pushing these, we were simply meeting a demand,’’ Nelson says.

On October 31, 2018, the first messages between criminals came in.
The Operative was sitting at his desk in the bunker when he saw them.

“It was very exciting and extremely satisfying,’’ he said.

“Messages from that first day indicated significant domestic criminality. This to me, was success.

“Little did I know how little sleep for the next three years I was about to have.’’

Hakan Ayik was the other criminal influencer but it is not clear if he knew Australia’s Mafia Man. Picture: Supplied

WHAT AFP, FBI FOUND IN CRIMS’ ENCRYPTED NETWORK

By infiltrating encrypted messages, the Ironside team had pulled off the impossible.
Now they faced the hard part.

First they had to collect the messages, work out which ones were about serious crime.

Then they had to operationalise it – turn mountain of messages and leads into evidence that could be used to prosecute hundreds of people in Australia and thousands globally.

As months went by, the number of devices grew – by operation’s end there would be more than 1000 in Australia and 10,000 worldwide – and the messages being decrypted by the police piled up.

In the last two weeks of April, 2020, there were 42,000 messages decoded.

Two months later EncroChat went down after European police located its servers and managed to hack into it.

SKY ECC was taken down in March this year after also being compromised by law enforcement.

In the final two weeks of April 2021, 2.67 million messages were intercepted.
The criminality they revealed was eye-popping – drug-trafficking on an enormous scale, money-laundering, extortion, violence, assaults, fraud and corruption.

Mafia. Bikies. Asian and European organised crime gangs.

The devices were in the hands of foreign hardened crooks in up to 20 countries, from New Zealand to the Netherlands.

Australian investigators were able to draw links between people and groups who they’d previously thought were enemies.

They got the first ever unfiltered look at which gangs and individuals were secretly working together.
They discovered underworld heavyweights who had never been on their radar.
And they finally got evidence on long-term targets they’d never quite been able to pin.

But the pressure was intense. Over nearly three years Ironside captured 25 million messages.

They intervened only when an imminent threat to life was identified: Gaughan’s “red line” was ever present – Ironside could not allow someone to die.

The AFP immediately tipped off the relevant state or territory police force about any apparent threat and local officers swung into action but never knew where the information had come from.

The digital surveillance collections unit developed artificial intelligence system to read, prioritise and alert investigators to the criminality and threats occurring in the millions of messages.

Training the police computers to identify the threats to life wasn’t straightforward.

Artificial intelligence can easily pick out the word “kill.’’
But while humans would recognise a misspelling such as “kll,’’, a machine might not.

Then there was slang, swearing, and foreign languages.
And the curious language of “criminalise” – the shorthand that crooks use between themselves.
And it wasn’t just what they said in messages, but the tone.

“We were doing things like sentiment analysis. Is this (message) positive, is this negative, is there an imminent threat there, what are the criminal themes?’’ Supt Nelson said.

“There was not only the technical challenge on how do we facilitate access, collection, decryption of this data but then how do we deal with the sheer volume of criminality that’s occurring on here?’’

One ace up the sleeves of investigators was the trust users had in the platform.

It meant they had abandoned their usual code and were speaking directly, naming names and placing orders for drugs in specific amounts and dollar values.

“They speak openly on them but I think they naturally have their own coded language,’’ Supt Nelson says.

“This is this concept of criminalise. And they’re probably not even conscious they’re doing it half the time.

“They could talk with their mates about multi-ton imports and things like that, but at the same time they use a language which is not conducive to, say, picking up Google translate or Google talk and using those big data analytics platforms that have been built around smart speakers.”

Apart from trust, police had something else working in their favour.

Their targets were “all very arrogant blokes” who were certain they were one step ahead of law enforcement.

“They think they are bulletproof and it won’t happen to them,’’ Gaughan said.

And just as Apple refined its iPhone, AN0M evolved to give the users what they wanted.
And that included smaller, and newer phones.

“AN0M succeeded because we understood our market and had a better product than our competitors,” Inspector Matt Walls, manager of day to day operations of digital collections, said.

“We knew from the start we had features that would appeal to the crooks. But the real trick was that we had the ability to really “listen” to our customers in a way our competitors couldn’t, so we were able to evolve the product to maintain our advantage,” he said.

“The users spoke about wanting smaller, newer phones and like magic AN0M pivoted to newer, smaller phones almost overnight,” he said.

Operation Ironside blew open the OMCGs and their links to organised crime. Picture: Supplied

By April 2021, Ironside – the humble investigation which started out with just three AFP agents officers – had become a monster in size, as thousands of investigators and specialists joined its ranks and police from every mainland state, along with New Zealand, were brought in to bring it to a close.

Ironside’s senior investigating officer, Detective Superintendent Des Appleby, says the AFP had been witnessing plots to import drugs, murder other criminals or harm their families over drug debts, and extensive money-laundering and drug manufacturing and shared intelligence with other agencies more than 1000 times.

“We have helped other police forces solve a number of murders and other serious crimes along the way,’’ he says.

Appleby says the impact on organised crime in Australia would be profound.

“I personally think particularly with the Comanchero motorcycle gang it will hopefully wipe them out. The Lone Wolfs the same thing. Other organised crime figures,’’ he says.

“It will shatter their confidence in encrypted devices.’’

The Lone Wolfs bikie gang’s operations became exposed while using AN0M. Picture: Supplied

He said those who had been using AN0M and didn’t get rounded up by police this week would know it was just a matter of time until they did.

By May, the operation had become so large that for the first time in the AFP’s history, almost the entire force was dedicated to the operation. Detectives were ready to pounce and unmask the underworld’s biggest players as the FBI prepared to shutdown AN0M on June 7.

“For a long time we were like a minnow in the whole market – but when you look at the opportunities – the minnows could catch the big fish,’’ Commander Boudry says.

The sheer size of the take-down is expected to put significant pressure on Australia’s judicial system, clogging up the courts and making a number of lawyers rich.

Officials from the Australian Border Force, Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission, the Australian Taxation Office, Australian Securities and Investments Commission and state and territory police will also be hard-pressed to keep up with the caseload.

Commander of Investigations in NSW Kirsty Schofield. Picture: Richard Dobson

Kirsty Schofield, the Commander of Investigations in New South Wales, said an enormous amount of work was needed to examine what was found during the searches and to compile briefs of evidence in court.

“I really think this is going to see us working for the next few years,’’ she says.

Boudry had the final word for those caught out by Operation Ironside.

“Well, we got you on this one,’’ he says.

“The (AFP) Commissioner (Reece Kershaw) talks about outsmarting criminals – and we’ve done that here.

“We … have people who are capable of extraordinary things. Technically capable and who understand the environment in which they work. These people were able to put those two things together and truly outsmart the criminals.’’

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Originally published as Part 3: Criminal ‘influencers’ who took the AFP and FBI bait by using the AN0M app