The FBI secretly built and sold a fake encrypted phone company to the entire criminal underworld
After a 2018 sting shut down a real encrypted phone company favored by cartels, an FBI informant with ties to its distribution network offered the bureau something bigger: help build the next one. The result, ANOM, was a real company, secretly created and controlled by the FBI and Australian Federal Police, that distributed roughly 12,000 phones to more than 300 criminal organizations across over 100 countries. Every user believed their communications were unbreakable. Every message was silently copied to law enforcement the moment it was sent. For 18 months, agencies read more than 27 million messages before finally shutting it down on June 8, 2021, with over 800 arrests worldwide.
// Why This Isn’t An Outlier
ANOM wasn’t a one-time trick. It’s the same institutional habit the record shows repeating for eighty years.
Build the capability quietly. Use it at a scale the public never approved. Account for it only once a court forces the paperwork into daylight. The Classified Record traces that exact pattern from a 1946 screening memo to the 3.4 million warrantless searches the FBI ran in a single year, using the government’s own documents, not speculation.
Get the book on Amazon →ANOM devices were built on a modified version of GrapheneOS, stripped of GPS tracking, with a hidden encrypted messaging app accessible only through a disguised entry point, tapping a calculator app's login screen rather than opening it normally. Real court records describe a master decryption key secretly built into the encryption system itself, one that silently attached to every message sent and allowed law enforcement to decrypt and store it in real time, as it was transmitted, without any indication to the user.
By the time the operation ended, agencies had catalogued more than 27 million messages exchanged by users who believed they were completely secure, discussing narcotics shipments, money laundering, and in some cases explicit threats of violence. The final coordinated takedown, spanning the United States, Australia, and more than a dozen European countries, resulted in over 800 arrests and the seizure of roughly 8 tons of cocaine, 22 tons of marijuana, 2 tons of methamphetamine, and more than $48 million in cash.
This establishes that a federal law enforcement agency formally created, operated, and marketed an entire technology company for the specific purpose of deceiving its users about the security of their communications, at a global scale, for years, and that this is confirmed directly by the Justice Department's own unsealed court filings and press statements, not investigative speculation. This is among the most extensively, officially documented deception operations in modern law enforcement history.
What this does not establish is that this specific technique is now a routine or repeatable tool. Justice Department officials have noted the operation's unusual success depended heavily on its user base being almost entirely criminal from the outset, a condition that limits how often a comparable operation could realistically be run against a general population without far broader legal and ethical complications.
Case: Operation Trojan Shield / ANOM, FBI and Australian Federal Police. Concluded June 8, 2021.
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