Planet Money - How the FBI's fake cell phone company put criminals into real jail cells

Episode Date: May 31, 2024

There is a constant arms race between law enforcement and criminals, especially when it comes to technology. For years, law enforcement has been frustrated with encrypted messaging apps, like Signal and Telegram. And law enforcement has been even more frustrated by encrypted phones, specifically designed to thwart authorities from snooping. But in 2018, in a story that seems like it's straight out of a spy novel, the FBI was approached with an offer: Would they like to get into the encrypted cell phone business? What if they could convince criminals to use their phones to plan and document their crimes — all while the FBI was secretly watching? It could be an unprecedented peek into the criminal underground. To pull off this massive sting operation, the FBI needed to design a cell phone that criminals wanted to use and adopt. Their mission: to make a tech platform for the criminal underworld. And in many ways, the FBI's journey was filled with all the hallmarks of many Silicon Valley start-ups. On this show, we talk with journalist Joseph Cox, who wrote a new book about the FBI's cell phone business, called Dark Wire. And we hear from the federal prosecutor who became an unlikely tech company founder. Help support Planet Money and hear our bonus episodes by subscribing to Planet Money+ in Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/planetmoney.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

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Andrew Young's journey into the tech world is very different from any founder story I've ever heard. It starts in 2018 in a hotel room in Las Vegas. It was a suite. It was a pretty nice suite. Uh, we needed a lot of room. There was approximately, I don't know, there was a lot, I would say 20 people total. In a hotel room in Vegas. Sounds like quite a party.

Yeah. Felt like we're at 22 again. The thing is, Andrew was a federal prosecutor and the people he was in the room with, they were not exactly party people either. Yeah, it's swimming with FBI agents. This is Joseph Cox, the journalist I first heard this story from. He covers technology and crime and he says along with Andrew and those FBI agents there were officials from Canada and Australia And they're all waiting for a very special person to arrive the special person was the CEO of a phone company called phantom secure and

Whereas a traditional phone company prides itself in the clearest call quality or highest megapixel cameras Phantom was different because ph Phantom made phones for criminals. What Phantom did was take BlackBerry handsets, they ripped out the GPS, the camera, the microphone, and then they put pretty sophisticated encryption technology on it, meaning that even if the police or the FBI did manage to intercept a phantom secure message, it doesn't matter. It's just going to be complete garbage to them, a series of ones and zeros and letters. And this was frustrating to law enforcement because even if they could get a wiretap of one of these phones, they couldn't read what people were writing. And so Andrew knew that if he could unscramble these messages,

he would have a treasure trove of evidence. If we can get in there, we can do a hundred years worth of casework in a matter of months because we have all the evidence that would normally take years to gather. But that would require cooperation from the CEO of the phone company, Vincent Ramos. That was who they were waiting for in that hotel room in Vegas. So Ramos knocks on the door. And he sees two FBI agents there who identify themselves as FBI agents. So he's obviously confused.

I think he said something along the lines of, well, I'm in the wrong place. They said, you're not in the wrong place. Andrew gets to work, tells Ramos, here's the situation. Here's all this evidence we have. We have a pretty solid criminal conspiracy case against you. We could arrest you right now, charge you in San Diego, but we'd rather make a deal.

We'd rather you flip and give us a back door into your servers. They spend something like three days in that hotel suite negotiating around the clock. More and more officials keep popping out of the bedroom to talk with Ramos. At one point, you know, he asks how many people are even in that room because it's just almost like a clown car in a way and all these officials keep streaming out. They sleep there at the same time. It's a really, really unusual situation. And bit by bit, Ramos starts to come around to the idea of going back to San Diego with the officials. And so we are planning on leaving regardless the next day.

With him like saying, hey, we'll give you a ride to San Diego. He's getting a ride either way. It was sort of where he was going to sit in the car was our thinking. But before the trek back to San Diego, they decide let's get some rest. One person watches Ramos, everyone else heads to bed. And I'm dead asleep when I got a call from one of the agents saying he's gone. And I was like, what do you mean he's gone? And he said, Ramos is gone.

He's not here. Ramos had escaped. The FBI put out an alert for him, launched a massive manhunt. And he's eventually found. But Andrew soon learns that while Ramos was on the run, he did manage to shut down a key server that the FBI would have needed for their back door. And right there, Andrew's dream of having a back door into the criminal

underworld almost died, except. I get this call from this lawyer I've never heard of, who basically said, I want to meet you tomorrow. See, all the publicity around Ramos and his manhunt had scared other people in the encrypted phone industry. This lawyer worked for one of those people who had been working on his own phone for criminals. And the lawyer said his client wanted to make a deal. His offer is that the FBI can take this company and use it for their own investigations. So in other words, rather than the FBI investigating a company like Phantom Secure, inserting a

backdoor, going through all of that pain, why doesn't the FBI just run its own encrypted phone company and then put in whatever backdoor they feel like? They could run a tech startup for organized crime. Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Nick Fountain. What would that look like, the FBI running a tech startup for organized crime. It is a very fraught proposition. And yet, enticing? Today on the show, one of the weirdest tech companies of all time. How the FBI got into the cell phone business and why, eventually, they had to get out. From your car radio to your smart speaker, NPR meets you where you are in a lot of different

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Download the NPR app in your app store today, or you can go to npr.org slash app. All right. So this episode is largely based on a new book by Joseph Cox. The book is called Dark Wire. It's terrific. There are so many incredible details in it, about global organized crime, about laundering drug money, but today we are going to focus on the story of the kind of real but also kind of fake business the FBI would end up running. One of the people behind that business was Andrew, the prosecutor from earlier, who had dreamt of a back door into the criminal underground only to have that dream slip through his fingers.

For him, the idea of the FBI running a tech company was a no-brainer. I was thinking I want to do it. I at least want to see if we can run it ourselves. I was coming off of what I felt like was a huge loss. And I still had this void. You know, that was the big game. That was the Super Bowl and we lost. And you may never get back to that. And then so when this opportunity was pitched,

I was like, this is a way to get back to the big game. Did you guys know how to run a tech company? No, no, none of us had run a tech company, but we recognized we're gonna have to do this. It was too good of an opportunity to pass up. Because if they did this right, they could create a phone that was so specifically designed for doing crime, only criminals would want it. And if people use the phones, which the FBI can monitor, to document their crimes,

well, that's a prosecutor's dream. Andrew and his team get to work. They strike a deal with the guy who had been working on the phone. He becomes, in law enforcement speak, a confidential human source. They put him on the payroll, in part because he already has the right reputation in the criminal underworld. They called the phone company Anom, maybe a play off the word anonymous, and then they run into a challenge that has doomed many early stage tech companies.

We needed a quality product that worked. Yeah, this is key for any business. But Joseph says it was especially true for the FBI's phone company, Anom. The product had to be not just good. It had to be better than all of the other encrypted phone companies that were used by criminals because you wanted them to move over to a norm as well. The FBI had to not only make a pretty good encrypted phone company, they really had to

try to make the best. Yeah, there were already some competitors out there, other encrypted phone networks that criminals were using. And also, criminals could just go out and buy normal phones and use encrypted messaging apps like Signal or Telegram. The FBI needed to do better than all that. To attract the right customers, they'd need to make it seem like Enom was developed for criminals by criminals, who wouldn't respond to a subpoena like a big tech company might. They'd have to build a phone that was both feature packed and super secure. They decided to use off the shelf Android phones,

Google Pixels actually, with a special secure operating system. And I love this part, the Anom messaging app, it was gonna be hidden behind a fake calculator. When you type in a certain pin code and press equals, the calculator fades away and the Anom app reveals itself. And Andrew and the FBI go further. They start requesting features that'll make Anom even better than their competitors. It's a pretty funny idea of a bunch of feds sitting around brainstorming

different features they think criminals will like. But then how to use those very features to spy on their users. If we were going to give them the ability to take a photo and send a photo that was blurred, we needed the ability to undo it. If we were going to let them do, you know, voice, disguise their voices, then we needed to be able to undo it. And so we wanted to add as many features as we could because we knew it made a better product but then we also had to figure out a way to undo it.

They also got to do some things that normal businesses can't. For example, in their advertising, they could just lie. Like the phones would be advertised as having the GPS permanently disabled. Of course, that was not true. Another thing, if your non-phone got confiscated by the police, they said you could wipe it remotely. This of course didn't matter because the FBI had already read and archived all your messages. So they've designed their feature-packed phone both for criminals but also the cops spying on them. The next challenge Andrew faced? What to

charge for the phones? I vividly remember having discussions about setting the price of it because we didn't want it to be too cheap because we felt like we could have set any price we wanted to, right? We could have set it for $400, $500, $300. And the idea being- Because the government would happily subsidize the cost of the device or whatever. Right. idea being like... Pete, because the government would happily subsidize the cost of the device or whatever. Pete, right. But we made a conscious decision not to do that because we didn't, for one, we were concerned that they would think, well, why are we getting this for so cheap?

Pete, right. Pete, and two, it's more of a, I can't remember the economic principle, but it's that people will buy, you know, a luxury item that's... Pete, Veblen Good. Yes, that one. And we're like, if we price it above everybody else, they're just going to think it's better. A Veblen Good is the rare product where as price increases, so does demand. Think an expensive handbag or a luxury car.

And criminals, of course, don't want bargain basement prices when it comes to their security. If you signal that they're getting an ultra premium product by charging an ultra premium price, maybe they'll want it more. The NOM sticker price would be $2,000 for a 6 month subscription. That is, if they could get criminals to actually use these things. That is after the break. culture section. From the buzzy movies, tiny desks, and artists that everyone seems to know about, type in npr.org for the latest and greatest in the pop culture universe. The NPR app cuts through the noise bringing you local,

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You can have it all in one place, your pocket. Download the NPR app today. Hey, it's Greg Rosalski. For generations, American politicians have talked about freedom as if it only means freedom from government. Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stieglitz in a new book opposes that narrow view of freedom. So it's really what you are free to do. Somebody who is at the point of starvation doesn't really have much freedom. He does what he has to do to do. You know, somebody who is at the point of starvation doesn't really have much freedom. He does what he has to do to survive. In our latest bonus episode, I talk with Stiglitz

about his conception of freedom and what he calls progressive capitalism, his vision of the government playing a more active role in the economy. That's for Planet Money Plus listeners. If that's you, thank you very much. If it's not, well, it could be. By signing up, you get sponsor-free listening and support and PR. Just go to plus.npr.org. So Andrew, our federal prosecutor, and the FBI, they have their phone. Anam is ready to go. But here's one weird wrinkle.

Andrew never got permission from the higher-ups at the Department of Justice to spy on Anam phones in the US. See, in the US, running a wiretap requires convincing a judge that a crime is likely being committed. And Andrew says he was willing to go through that process every single time, but the powers that be at the Department of Justice never even let him get that far. In the end, the FBI decided to partner with law enforcement from other countries, including Australia, where in the fall of 2018, the first phones hit the streets.

So a NOM, it starts in Australia and it's slow at first. The product does not really take off with any great speed. This is kind of the make or break moment for a nom and for the FBI's ambitions of making a tech company. If their phones never take off, the whole thing would be a waste. Now, the FBI could not go out and sell the phones as the FBI.

And so they turned to a familiar marketing technique. Were you guys doing influencer marketing of these phones? Yes, it's essentially what we were doing. And the influencers, in this context, happened to be the heads of these organizations. Yeah, they seated the phones with real kingpins, people running international drug smuggling rings. This had a couple of upsides. For one, it showed that, you know,

real legit bad guys were using Anom and they thought it was safe. And also because Anom devices could only communicate with other Anom devices, it created a sort of walled garden. This is what economists call the network effect. These kingpins of criminal networks would essentially tell people, created a sort of walled garden. This is what economists call the network effect. These kingpins of criminal networks would essentially tell people,

You're not talking to me unless you're using a nom. And so then all those, the four guys below him get a noms and then they go to their crews and say, well, if you want to talk to me, you got to be on a nom. The FBI gave these influencers commissions based on their sales and their underling sales. And sometimes they even offered ownership of the company. In other words, equity. I do think at some point we had given away more than 100%. That's fraud, Andrew. Security is fraud. But, you know, it's all right.

Andrew says these marketing techniques, they worked surprisingly well. Pretty soon, they had hundreds of people across many countries using the phones. And the FBI could see, people were using them for all sorts of crimes. Massive drug deals, money laundering, ordering hits on their enemies. And also for other things.

They loved to send each other photos, which was always shocking to us because so many of them are so unnecessary. What sort of photos are we talking? They take pictures of their faces. Ah, selfies. You can think of it. Selfies, other types of photos. They love to send those to each other.

Below the belt photos. Below the belt photos. Interesting. Among friends, which was a interesting subculture phenomena and- Ha, yeah. Yeah, those. That's quite funny.

It also just shows how absolute the criminals trusted Anom. Not only were they prepared to send information about their crimes across Anom, they were prepared to send photos of their genitalia across it as well. Okay. We've talked about all the clever design that went into these phones and the software and

the pricing decisions and the clever marketing and all that is true and helped a NOM grow. But what really helped the FBI was a trick they had up their sleeve. Yes. The FBI is in a great position in that it doesn't have to play by the rules of ordinary business. It can disrupt its rivals in a very, very aggressive way. Remember, Anam was not the only game out there. There were other more popular encrypted phone companies like Anchor Chat and Sky.

The FBI and others had been investigating them for a while. And Andrew knew if those did get shut down, well, people would come to a NOM. I said, buy 8,000 phones because you're going to need them. Um, because there's all those people who have nowhere else to go and they're going to come to a NOM. It's a business technique that not many businesses can do is get the authorities to shut down their competitors, but it works. Well, that's, um, I reject the premise that that's what we were doing. Uh, but if it happened, you know, it was, I think it worked out better for everybody.

Okay. Whatever the reason the competitors did indeed get shut down. And Andrew was right. Demand for Anam exploded. At one point, Joseph says, the FBI had to charter a plane to Europe and whisk eight duffel bags full of phones through Dutch customs. And this is normal, right? For any successful startup, there comes a time when their dreams take off.

And then they hit the problem of scaling. Though in this case the FBI had some unique additional problems with scaling. You know if we know somebody's gonna get killed we have to try to do something about it. We don't have a choice we have to do it. Which means they had to read every single message that went across their network and if there was a threat to life, they had to intervene. And as the number of Anom phones out there grew from 100 to 1000 to 12,000, reading all those messages became really hard. The FBI had dozens and dozens of agents working around the clock reading messages. And those threats to life, they started to multiply. So what would happen is that the FBI would detect a threat to life and they would mitigate

it somehow. They would warn the authorities or otherwise act and then that one would be stopped, thankfully. But the criminals would start asking themselves, how the hell did the authorities know this? How did they know we were going to murder this person? And rather than suspecting the phones, they suspected each other. And then you have another threat to life because they want to kill who they believe is a snitch or a rat. And it started to create this never-ending cycle of violence and paranoia. All the while, the FBI is intercepting more and more messages. It has to call in more agents from around the country, please come to San Diego and help us dig through this information. It's too much. It's absolutely

getting to the point where the FBI are finding it very, very difficult to maintain momentum or tempo on the amount of data that's coming in. Yeah. In the end, what led Anom to shut down was its own success. Two and a half years in, it just became too unsustainable, too dangerous for the FBI. So the FBI and their many foreign counterparts at this point decide on an end date. The police raids would begin on June 7th, 2021.

They followed the sun. The Australian Federal Police and state agencies there, they launched their own raids and then held their own press conference. Gentlemen, it's good to have you with us today. Saying that we have messages from a non. As the Sun moved over to Europe, European officials did basically the same thing. They launched their own raids with drones and swap teams and everything you would expect. And then they held a press conference in Europol, also announcing their involvement. This law enforcement operation is exceptional.

Until eventually the Sun got over to the West Coast to San Diego. These international arrests and the US charges were possible because of a San Diego-based FBI investigation like none other in history. And the US Attorney's Office there, they announced that the FBI and U.S. authorities have been running a NOM for essentially its entire existence. Thank you all. This was a big moment, the big reveal. The FBI and their counterparts have been running what Joseph calls the largest sting operation

in history. Anom resulted in more than a thousand arrests. There was something like 150 threats to life mitigated. They seized tons upon tons of cocaine, methamphetamine, and other drugs, weapons as well. It really did generate a massive impact on the criminal syndicates that were swept into Anam. One important note. No one in the US was arrested because of Anam.

Remember, Andrew never got permission from the higher-ups at the Department of Justice. To this day, he still finds this disappointing. But he says this operation, it was about more than arrests. It was about sowing doubt in the minds of organized crime. Sowing doubt in the very idea of an encrypted phone. See, authorities had not just shut down Phantom Secure and their main competitors, they had also pushed users into what turned out to be an FBI front. And that kind of left organized crime with a conundrum.

Who do you turn to now? You know, because the established legacy companies are all gone. And so any other company that shows up is brand new. And how do you know with certainty that that's not being run by the FBI, the DEA? So to me, our goal ultimately became, you know, to take this away as a tool. And I think for the most part that worked. I do. Andrew readily admits that this operation, it didn't end crime forever. Other criminals have filled the vacuum that it left.

But maybe now there's just a little more friction. It's just a little bit harder to do the business of crime. At least that's his hope. Joe's book is called Dark Wire, the incredible true story of the largest sting operation ever. He's also the co-founder of a new news organization called 404 Media. Y'all publish basically a thing that makes me jealous, if not once a day, every week. That's what we aim to do.

We aim to please our subscribers by infuriating the other journalists by what we're publishing. This episode was produced by Emma Peasley and edited by Jess Jang. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez and engineered by Sina Lofredo. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer. I'm Nick Fountain. This is NPR. Thank you for listening. the world. Knowing how to forage and to live with the land is integral to Ami's culture. And down your block. From CPR News, this is Colorado Matters. And you can find all of that and more in your pocket. Download the NPR app today. Climate change fuels hurricanes. China promises to stop. The big lie persists. Butterflies

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