AN0M sting: How criminal underworld got encrypted AN0M phones

Wholesalers, drivers, agents; for the first time the highly organised structure that sent encrypted devices into the hands of crime figures is revealed.

Police have revealed how the AN0M devices and encrypted platform were distributed into the criminal underworld through a highly-organised, four-tier business system.

Wholesalers, agents, representatives and drivers were all involved in getting the devices – smart phones stripped of all tracking capabilities – into the hands of bikies, mafia figures and drug-smugglers.

It had previously been revealed police tricked “influencers’, most notably fugitive Sydney drug kingpin Hakan Ayik, to encourage other criminals to purchase the encrypted devices, and sign up to a subscription which allowed encrypted messages to be sent and received.

Ayik, who is hiding out in Turkey, and the other people involved in the network did not know the supposedly secure platform had been devised by an informant working for the FBI, and that the messages were being copied and read by the Australian Federal Police.

Hakan Ayik, is hiding out in Turkey.

More than 11,000 of the devices were distributed across the globe, of which 1650 were located in Australia.

According to the Australian Federal Police, the distribution of AN0M started with wholesalers, who police described as “mid to high-level criminals, some with exclusive distribution rights in certain countries and regions.’’

Below the wholesalers came the agents, who had distribution rights for particular territories. These agents employed staff to recruit more buyers and deal with “customer’’ issues. This included when customers wanted to have their data wiped remotely – one of the benefits spruiked by the shadowy AN0M bosses.

The ANoM app led to the arrests of hundreds of people worldwide.

The third tier of the AN0M business structure comprised “representatives’’, who re-sold the stripped-down devices pre-loaded with the AN0M app hidden behind the calculator. These people also levied the subscription fees.

Finally, at the bottom of the pecking order, drivers delivered the devices, doing handovers in car parks and on the streets in return for envelopes of cash, or handing over device prepaid with cryptocurrency.

It cost $1700 to buy an AN0M-enabled phone, which could not be used for any other purposes, having had its ability to make and receive calls, or send and receive emails or do internet searches stripped from the device. The annual subscription fee to use the app was $1250.

Buyers paid dearly for a device and platform that was secretly copying their supposedly secure messages and sending to the Australian Federal Police in Canberra to monitor in real-time.

“ANOM’s distributors, administrators and agents had so much confidence in the secrecy of their devices that they openly marketed them to other potential users as designed by criminals for criminals,” said Randy Grossman, acting U.S. lawyer for the Southern District of California, where the FBI agents who worked on the case are based.

Originally published as AN0M sting: How criminal underworld got encrypted AN0M phones