How biggest sting in history brought down world’s toughest criminals

In early 2020, wanted gangster Hakan Ayik was coming to grips with Zoom calls. As he sat in the cafe of his Istanbul hotel, he had no idea every detail of his latest meeting was being monitored by police and the FBI.

Underworld drug kingpin Hakan Ayik.

It was March 2020, the start of the Covid pandemic, and like half the planet, Australia’s most wanted gangster Hakan Ayik was coming to grips with meeting work colleagues online via Zoom.

The prolific drug smuggler was sitting in the cafe of the Kings Cross Hotel that he owns and runs in the Turkish city of Istanbul, talking about how to turbocharge his illicit business, flogging encrypted phones. The phones and their encrypted platform, known as AN0M, were proving popular with international drug cartels and money-laundering syndicates, and Ayik wanted to maximise profits.

Three other men were in the meeting, and one of them, identified only as Afgoo, had dialled in, and appeared on Ayik’s laptop. Afgoo was the global head of the AN0M business.

Ayik, who had fled Sydney more than a decade earlier and had managed to stay a step ahead of law-enforcement ever since, was new to Zoom. “It’s crystal clear,’’ Ayik commented to Afgoo and the two other men, adding: “Zoom is amazing, isn’t it.’’

What’s really amazing is that Ayik had no idea that every detail of the meeting was being monitored by police and the FBI. And he didn’t know Afgoo was the man who secretly sold the AN0M platform to law enforcement and was now operating as a confidential informant to the FBI.

The details are contained in a compelling new book by investigative tech journalist Joseph Cox, which is being released this week in the US. The book, Dark Wire, is being translated into several ­European languages, and is under development by Netflix as a film.

Dark Wire is the first book to delve into the extraordinary global sting carried out by the FBI and Australian Federal Police, in which 28 million messages exchanged by criminals on AN0M were intercepted and copied by the police, resulting in thousands of arrests worldwide.

It contains some eye-popping new details about the extraordinary sting of the century, including that Ayik knew Afgoo for several years before they embarked on the AN0M venture.

Afgoo – identified only by the handle or nickname he used on the AN0M platform – previously worked as a seller of encrypted phones for Canadian company Phantom Secure.

Cox describes him as the “tech expert’’ who Ayik first consulted about whether he too should put his trust into Phantom Secure.

While it had previously been revealed by police that Ayik was a key influencer and distributor of AN0M phones, and that a confidential source had sold AN0M to the FBI in return for $US180,000, it was not known that Ayik and Afgoo were old associates.

The revelation heaps further pressure on Ayik, who remains in a Turkish prison after being arrested in November when Turkish police rounded up 42 foreigners accused of criminality on Turkish soil, including Ayik’s Australian associates Erkan Dogan, Baris Tukel, Jimmy Awaijan, and Melbourne model-turned bikie boss Hasan Topal

Ayik, who renounced his Australian citizenship and is a Turkish citizen, is unlikely to be extradited to Australia or the US, where he is wanted on racketeering charges relating to AN0M. He faces local charges in Turkey.

Cox also reveals in his book that the collapse of two other encrypted phone companies popular with the criminal underworld, Encrochat and Sky, may not have been the coincidence law enforcement originally implied.

Encrochat was hacked by ­European police in 2020, and Sky in 2021, leading to police raids against those who had used the messaging platforms to organise drug deals and other criminal activity. The fall of the two platforms drove users onto AN0M – where the AFP and FBI were monitoring and collecting the messages sent across the globe.

“Initially when I started, I believed it was just a nice, happy accident,’’ Cox said of the downfall of Europe-based Encrochat and Canadian company Sky.

“But the more people I spoke to, including the European officials I spoke to, there’s a Dutch one in there, he explicitly phrases it as a master plan. And I think that’s one of the biggest revelations of the book.

“These operations weren’t conducted in silos, or as a vacuum. The Americans were talking to the Europeans about much of their plans. Not everything, it was bit by bit. Enough for people to understand, ‘OK, we’re going to hack Sky, you’re going to indict, and then the users were probably going to go to AN0M’.’’

Cox, who runs his own company 404 Media, spent 10 years covering the encrypted phone industry through his previous role with Vice Media’s Motherboard. He has revealed that Lithuania was the third-party country that helped Australia and the US find a way to legally store the millions of messages and provide them to the FBI.

Author Joseph Cox.

Dark Wire: The Incredible True Story of the Largest Sting Operation Ever by Joseph Cox.

He said Lithuania agreed to store the messages on secure servers within its boundaries, and, under a mutual legal assistance treaty, sent them to the US on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays for the FBI to process.

Messages taken from AN0M devices within the US were stripped out of the message bundles as the FBI did not have approval for a domestic wire tap, and Lithuania was able to do what Australia wasn’t able to – provide the messages to a foreign agency.

The AFP played a key role in the AN0M sting – known locally as Operation Ironside – after working with the FBI on the 2018 take-down of Phantom Secure.

An Australian tech expert working for the AFP, known in Cox’s book as CIN325, developed a backdoor entry into the AN0M platform which allowed police to read and copy the messages as they were being sent.

Cox reveals how CIN325 met Afgoo in a hotel suite overseas, “geeking out’’ in a corner over the details of how to develop the backdoor into AN0M.

He goes into amusing detail about how the AFP and FBI worked 14-hour days developing AN0M, living on takeaway food and at one point, drinking two bottles of grocery store whiskey as they sat around the edge of the hot tub with their feet in the bath.

He also reveals how the FBI was intimately involved in the AN0M business, at one stage flying 1000 phones into locations on an FBI jet to ensure all criminals eager to get their hands on a phone were able to access one.

This immediate access was something Ayik had identified in the Zoom meeting in Istanbul in March 2020.

“It goes back to efficiency and getting the product out there,’’ he tells his criminal associates.

“Look at McDonald’s, they go and get the burgers out there. You’re not waiting. That’s why people go there.’’

Cox reveals that the assassination of a low-level criminal in Sweden named Sascha had been planned over AN0M, two weeks before Swedish police were given access to the AN0M messages.

Australian police had been deeply concerned about such a scenario playing out here but were able to act on any threats to life identified.

Cox reveals AN0M was shut down in June 2021 just as it risked collapsing under the weight of its own popularity and size.

Crooks, including Ayik, had got their hands on a black box that allowed the phones to be set up without needing to be programmed by Afgoo, meaning law enforcement started to lose control of who was registering as an AN0M user. A portal was also established which accelerated the sign-up rate of AN0M users.

With more than 12,000 devices active across the criminal underworld, law enforcement eventually pulled the pin in June 2021, resulting in thousands of ­arrests worldwide, including 392 arrests in Australia.

Dark Wire: The Incredible True Story of the Largest Sting Operation Ever, by Joseph Cox, published by Public Affairs.