Stung Real Good by the Most Secure Phone on The Planet (or so they were told)

It's a long story - here's a little of it and YOU can read a lot more: |Billed as the most secure phone on the planet, An0m became a viral sensation in the underworld. There was just one problem for anyone using it for criminal means: it was run by the police

Big Bang’s targets’ alleged crimes ranged from drug trafficking to attempted murder. What they had in common was their choice of texting app.

Hook, line and sinker: the An0m phone sting led to more than 800 arrests around the world in June 2021. Illustration: Sébastien Thibault/The Guardian

‘Every message was copied to the police’: the inside story of the most daring surveillance sting in history

Simon Parkin

the Guardian

". . .An0m was marketed and sold not so much to the security conscious as the security paranoid; its embedded suite of anonymising digital tools went far beyond the requirements of the average user. According to Australian police, it was the ideal telecommunications channel to arrange the safe passage of A$64m of cocaine across the world. An0m was not, however, a secure phone app at all. Every single message sent on the app since its launch in 2018 – 19.37m of them – had been collected, and many of them read by the Australian federal police (AFP) who, together with the FBI, had conceived, built, marketed and sold the devices. . ."

The scheme was seeded 10 years earlier, in Vancouver. There, in 2008, Vincent Ramos, a young entrepreneur who started out as a bathtub salesman before progressing to smartphones, founded Phantom Secure, a telecoms company that promised users absolute privacy. It was a prescient selling point. After years in which data has been endlessly mined, the idea that users of technology now want to avoid online surveillance is widespread in Silicon Valley; Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, recently pronounced: “The future is private.” In 2008, however, both the sentiment and the technology that enabled secure communication were niche concerns.

In contrast to An0m’s bespoke technology, Phantom Secure’s phones were off-the-shelf BlackBerries modified to remove the camera, microphone and GPS tracking software, and installed with a remote-wipe feature. Every message sent from one device to another was encrypted and routed through servers in Panama and Hong Kong. To build word-of-mouth interest in his new product, Ramos offered free devices to high-profile “influencers” – rappers and athletes for whom privacy was a primary concern. . .