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The Australian Broadcasting Corporation is covering it in more detail than the Reuters article, including some of the mechanics of how it was pulled off: https

• FatalLogic 5y ago
  >the AFP is now telling Ayik to hand himself in to avoid recriminations from his associates The Australian Federal Police premise that he would be safer from reprisals in prison is an extremely shaky one [1] Although if they can cut him off from all funds, it might become true. [1] edit: https://www.aic.gov.au/sites/default/files/2020-05/tandi103.pdf https://www.aic.gov.au/sites/default/files/2020-05/tandi103.... - "homicide rate ... is up to 7 times higher [than outside]"
  • cromka 5y ago
    > "homicide rate ... is up to 7 times higher [than outside]" This is based on assumption that a regular "free" person has not made thousands of criminals at the same time.
  • Clewza313 5y ago
    That study computes that you're 7x more likely to get murdered in prison than in the "comparable non-prison community", but "comparable" here seems to be only for age/gender. I imagine the homicide rate is a wee bit higher than average for drug kingpins, particularly those seen to have ratted out 100+ people, even unintentionally.
    • duxup 5y ago
      Yeah this guy presumably had a wide ranging network of people who he knows, who haven't been caught, but may be exposed ... by him. This dude now poses a risk to a lot of very worried people right now and presumably the people he relies on are running for cover / maybe less likely to protect him.
  • gonzo41 5y ago
    He would be going to Golbourn Gaol, very very high security.
  • skhr0680 5y ago
    Prison sure kept Carl Williams safe. Safe from dying of old age!
• dang 5y ago
  Ok, we'll change to that from https://www.reuters.com/article/australia-crime/australian-police-arrest-over-200-after-cracking-underworld-messaging-app-idUSL3N2NQ0BR https://www.reuters.com/article/australia-crime/australian-p... above. Thanks!
  • sorenjan 5y ago
    The Vice and the NYT articles are better, and of course there's a Wikipedia article about it. This article is too focused on the Australian part of the operation with too little detail about how it actually worked. https://www.vice.com/en/article/akgkwj/operation-trojan-shield-anom-fbi-secret-phone-network https://www.vice.com/en/article/akgkwj/operation-trojan-shie... https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/08/world/australia/operation-trojan-horse-anom.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/08/world/australia/operation... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANOM_sting_operation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANOM_sting_operation
    • martyvis 5y ago
      Well this 145 second animated explainer by the Australian Federal Police covers it pretty well https://youtu.be/qq9wnMXvgOc https://youtu.be/qq9wnMXvgOc
• stef25 5y ago
  So they got to this most wanted man and instead of arresting him they fed him an app to help catch all his buddies while at the same time put a target on his back? Pretty daring move.
  • yawaworht1978 5y ago
    I don't think that was the story.he fled to Cyprus and escaped prison there. Someone somehow got him to believe the app is safe, he took kickbacks for the distribution, even. My main question is, how is this man living free in Turkey despite there being an interpol warrant?
    • pc86 5y ago
      Living free in Turkey doesn't necessarily mean he isn't in hiding, and/or hasn't paid off enough locals to be protected from extradition or capture.
    • csunbird 5y ago
      If he is living in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, which is actually a different country than Turkey and not recognized by other countries, it would be nearly impossible to extradite him without Turkey's cooperation. I doubt that Turkey would extradite her own citizen as well.
  • bostonsre 5y ago
    It seems like kind of an evil move for law enforcement to put a target on his back like that. But I assume all of the bad guys knew which guy was pushing the phones, so he was probably going to be a target no matter what.
    • at-fates-hands 5y ago
      >> It seems like kind of an evil move for law enforcement to put a target on his back like that. This is actually a very old method of getting criminals to cooperate with law enforcement. The FBI used to do this with mob guys all the time in the 1980's. Show up, arrest them publicly, put out false newspaper articles saying he was close to flipping. He starts getting heat from the outfit and sooner or later, distrust is sown and suddenly he becomes a marked man. Word gets back to him they put a hit on him, or things get dicey with the underbosses and suddenly, he's like a cat in a cage with nowhere to go - so he turns on his associates in order to save his own life. Cops used to do the same thing with low level drug dealers. Pressure them to flip on their supplier by pseudo arresting them, taking him away. They'd drive around a bit, then drop him off without cuffs in the middle of the neighborhood in broad daylight. Word gets around what happened, and suddenly the heat gets turned up because now he was seen getting out of a cop car with no cuffs? Must mean he's turned informant. Same thing, he gets too much heat and feels he needs to save himself and flips anyways.
• Zenst 5y ago
  You have to respect this type of policing approach, the ironey is just delicious when you consider: 1) They socialy engineered their target just like scammers would 2) They got the target to install and trust some 3rd party app they supplied 3) Then the victim pyramid pushed the scam app onto others. We often read (1) and (2) all the time with various scams from call centres, now the law has used that approach against a criminal and taken it too another level. I have a lot of respect for this approach against such criminals on many levels. But one take away from all this - IT security is often limited by humans and this highlights that perfectly. Just nice too read about criminals falling foul to the law who have taken one of their play-books and used it against them. Sure makes a change from reading about some old person loosing all their savings as somebody convinced them to install some random app just because they said they was from the bank/Microsoft etc.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • foobar1962 5y ago
    > They got the target to install and trust some 3rd party app I just heard on the radio (I’m an Aussie) that it’s not a phone app, it’s some kind if dedicated device that doesn’t do sms, mail or voice, only encrypted messages (that the law enforcement had the keys to).
    • Zenst 5y ago
      Oh that's even more delicious - it's like a modern version of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor%27s_New_Clothes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor%27s_New_Clothes story or the drug dealers new phone in this instance - That the dealer was sold on the aspect that it would be invisible to the law. It just get's better and better.
      • worik 5y ago
        It was much more than drug dealers. Generally drug dealers are servants of their community, providing goods and services to people in a collegial manner. These were viscous, murderous, gangsters. Their greed and hubris bought them down as much as cleaver policing. Which is not to minimise the cleverness of the coppers, very cleaver, very smart. Get these parasites out of our communities.
• m3kw9 5y ago
  Can they actually just pin that on him just to get him? They need a scape goat and may as well
  • WJW 5y ago
    Not to say that they might not "may as well", but why exactly would the police need a scapegoat for arresting criminals?
• 1cvmask 5y ago
  Many times it comes out much much later that the kingpins were in on it. The spy world equivalent of the double agent.