Hackdown on crime gangs
»»gardai treasure trove from FBI sting »»Major arrests to come ‘within weeks’
EXCLUSIVE BY
GARDAI have been given a treasure trove of intelligence on some of Ireland’s most dangerous criminals – thanks to a massive FBI phone hack.
Sources have said detectives have been handed hundreds of pieces of intelligence on gangsters here and abroad – including members of Daniel Kinahan’s Dubai-based drugs cartel.
And they added they expected major arrests and seizure within weeks as specialist Garda units start to exploit the massive haul of information from the compromised An0m messaging app.
Major criminals were using the phone to talk to each other on what they though was a secure system – but cops were watching everything after they set it up themselves in 2018.
And insiders have also told the Irish Mirror that the secret FBI dossiers will be used exactly the same way as the information handed over to gardai from the smashing of
the Encrochat phone system by French and Dutch cops in late 2019.
Unlike most police forces who used the Encrochat as evidence that could be given in open court, gardai decided to deploy the information sent to them from abroad as intelligence – which meant its existence was never officially acknowledged here.
And it paid off big time as intelligence led to a massive spike in drugs and cash seizures last year of around €50million, compared to some €24million in 2019.
Gardai last night refused to confirm if any data has been sent to them from the FBI from the An0m leak.
A spokesman told
the Irish Mirror it would not comment on its relationship with other police forces.
The An0m hack has already led to over 800 arrests in 17 countries, officials said yesterday.
More than €120million in cash was seized in raids around the world, along with tonnes of drugs, cryptocurrencies, weapons and luxury cars.
In Europe, there were 49 arrests in the Netherlands, 75 in Sweden and over 60 in Germany, where authorities seized hundreds of kilograms of drugs
Operation Greenlight/trojan Shield, conceived by Australian police and the FBI in 2018, began when US officials got involved in the development of An0m, a supposedly secure encrypted messaging app, which was then sold to organised crime networks.
The FBI helped to infiltrate the phones into 300 criminal groups in more than 100 countries, Calvin Shivers of the bureau’s Criminal Investigative Division told reporters in The Hague. One
Australian underworld figure began distributing phones containing the app to his associates, believing their communications were secure because the phones had been customised to remove all capabilities, including voice and camera functions, apart from An0m.
As a result, there was no attempt to conceal or code the details of the messages – which police were reading.
Australian Federal Police Commissioner Reece Kershaw said: “It was there to be seen, including ‘we’ll have a speedboat meet you at this point’, ‘this is who will do this’ and so on.”
The top cop said the underworld figure from Down Under, who has absconded, had “essentially set up his own colleagues” by distributing the phones, and was now a marked man.
He added: “The sooner he hands himself in, the better for him and his family.”