Fugitive bikie ‘using phones to ship drugs

One of Australia’s most wanted men is among those suspected of being behind encrypted phone services central to organised crime.

Accused Sydney drug lord Hakan Ayik in undated copy photo. Police know he had travelled to the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus as well as into mainland Turkey and Dubai where it was suspected he had a stash of cash but has now popped up doing business with Ulic in the Balkans. Picture: Supplied

One of Australia’s most wanted men is among outlaw bikies and their associates suspected to be ­behind encrypted phone services that have become central to the business of organised crime.

Fugitive Hakan “Huks” Ayik is believed by law enforcement to be heavily promoting a new encrypted messaging platform, Anom, to his connections while hiding in Istanbul.

The Comanchero outlaw ­motorcycle gang associate disappeared overseas more than a decade ago while facing charges in NSW over the importation of 200kg of heroin.

Australian investigators allegedly discovered Ayik, who has narrowly escaped the law several times, was continuing to arrange mass shipments of drugs to the country, aided by encrypted phones.

Authorities in Belgium, The Netherlands and France this week announced they had intercepted a billion messages from encrypted communication platform Sky ECC, resulting in hundreds of raids and dozens of arrests in one of the world’s most significant hits on organised crime.

The Weekend Australian understands the two-year Sky ECC operation is linked to the seizure by Australian authorities of 200kg of cocaine this week. Worth an ­estimated $90m, the seized bounty was placed on cargo ship MSC Joanna in Antwerp, Belgium, and offloaded to a smaller boat off the NSW coast before dawn on Thursday. Australian authorities say they had the vessels under surveillance after a tip-off from international counterparts last Saturday.

Criminals pay thousands of dollars a year for specially modified phones stripped of cameras, microphones, GPS navigation and other features and equipped with software for encrypted communication. The phones are typically marketed as “uncrackable” and can be instantly and remotely wiped of data if seized by police.

Anom describes itself as an “ultra secure mobile communications platform hardened against targeted surveillance and digital forensics”. It can be disguised on phones as a fully functional calculator that grants access through a combination of a secret mathematical formula and a fingerprint.

A feature called “cloaked groups” allows two or more organisations to collaborate while remaining anonymous, and a “duress password” wipes sensitive data permanently, Anom’s website says.

The company only responds to requests from government and law enforcement agencies in Panama, and specifically refers on its website to being out of reach of Australian laws. “Privacy isn’t just a promise, it’s mathematically ­ensured,” the site says.

Anom did not respond to questions from The Weekend Australian this week.

Ayik, now 42, fled Australia in 2010 and was briefly detained in Cyprus later that year but escaped.

He was arrested in Cyprus again the same year but was handed bail and fled again. In 2012, he escaped a police sting in Spain when authorities mistakenly swooped on a close friend.

Investigators also have intelligence that a former Australian resident and Hells Angels bikie associate, Darrien Kelly, is promoting separate encrypted communications platform Diamond Secure. Diamond Secure declined to answer questions this week, except to say: “We are not present in any way shape or form within Australia,” spokesman Edward Downes said this week. “We have no distribution, no resellers and no users there.”

Authorities also suspect the rights for the Australian underworld’s most dominant encrypted phone network, Ciphr, were bought by former NSW Comanchero Marco Coffen, now living in Dubai. Coffen is a person of interest in the shooting murder of ­security guard Gary Allibon during a robbery in Sydney in 2010.

Sky ECC maintains it was created for legitimate personal and business activity and has denied its encryption was cracked, saying an application was masquerading as the platform.