How a Small Australian Crime Network Showed the Future of Criminal Communication
After the EncroChat fiasco, criminals may be moving toward simpler, scattered setups with no single network for police to seize.
On a recent July afternoon, the same message buzzed onto more than three thousand phones across Sydney, across Australia, and abroad.
The people holding them had each paid a premium for a very particular kind of phone, sold on the promise that no one outside the conversation would ever read a word.
These phones had been heavily modified. The front camera was removed, so the device could never photograph its owner. The SIM card was foreign, making the user harder to trace. And the whole thing was rigged to erase itself the instant a wrong password was typed.
On top of all that, the phones ran encrypted messaging apps like Signal and Threema.
But when all three thousand of them lit up with the same message that July afternoon, it was not from some overarching criminal mastermind.
It was from the New South Wales Police.
Detectives told the users that their accounts had been linked to VIP Phones, an alleged underground supplier of modified handsets, and warned that everyone associated with the service could now be identified, investigated and prosecuted.
