As part of a sprawling international operation, law enforcement arrested about 800 suspects in connection with a range of crimes. To identify them, the FBI, together with Australian police, developed a special encrypted app.
Operation Trojan Shield/OTF Greenlight in numbers:
✔️ 27 million 📩 reviewed
✔️ 700 house searches 🏚️
✔️ 800 arrests 🚔
✔️ +30 tons of drugs seizedMore details: https://t.co/odnXlqtjUe #OperationTrojanShield pic.twitter.com/LbJmANiLcD
— Europol (@Europol) June 8, 2021
Since 2019, the FBI and Australian authorities secretly ran a company that manufactured phones pre-installed with an encrypted-messaging app, ANOM.
The devices were distributed among members of criminal organisations. In total, over 12,000 phones were produced and used by criminals in hundreds of countries.
Law enforcement monitored all messages and reviewed 27 million messages, helping identify criminals and track their activities.
As a result, more than 700 searches were conducted in 16 countries, and tonnes of drugs, weapons, and vehicles, and more than $48 million in fiat and cryptocurrencies were seized.
Europol called it “one of the largest and most complex operations by law enforcement to combat encrypted criminal activity”.
In March, authorities reported the breach of the encrypted-messaging platform Sky ECC.
For more on how governments are seeking to counter end-to-end encryption used in messaging apps, read ForkLog.
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