Sources, former sellers, and court records shed light on “No. 1 BC”, a company that loads an encrypted messaging app on phones for use by organized crime groups
Joseph Cox / VICE :
Context & Ripple Effects
No. 1 BC is the latest entry in a decade-long cycle VICE has documented: each time law enforcement takes down one criminal encrypted-phone provider, a successor fills the gap. The FBI's 2018 arrest of Phantom Secure's CEO removed the BlackBerry-hardening pioneer from the market, and Phantom Secure's slide from privacy phone shop to Sinaloa Cartel network became the template for how these businesses actually operate.
The successors kept coming — the MPC smartphone vendor revealed as a UK gang's front shuttered under investigation pressure, and the FBI/AFP Anom sting showed agencies running their own encrypted network from the inside. Reporting on No. 1 BC matters because it shows the supply side of this market persisting after all of those precedents.
First-order effects
- Law enforcement now has a named, documented target: court records and former sellers give prosecutors the same evidentiary map that preceded Phantom Secure's shutdown and MPC's collapse.
- Organized crime groups currently relying on No. 1 BC's loaded phones face the pattern's established endpoint — every predecessor in this coverage ended in takedown or exposure.
Second-order effects
- Each documented takedown in this cycle has redirected customers rather than eliminated demand, so sellers and resellers around No. 1 BC have an incentive to migrate users to the next unproven provider before scrutiny lands.
- The Anom precedent pushes agencies toward running infiltrated networks rather than only shutting them down, changing the risk calculus for anyone selling criminal-grade encryption hardware.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — Phantom Secure, MPC, Anom, and now No. 1 BC — the encrypted-phone market settles into a whack-a-mole structure where enforcement actions and successor firms feed each other, and the durable advantage sits with whichever side controls the network itself.
- The repeated use of court records and former sellers to unmask these firms points toward law enforcement treating provider takedowns as routine investigative infrastructure rather than exceptional operations.
The trend: Criminal encrypted-phone providers keep regenerating after each takedown, while law enforcement shifts from simply shutting them down to infiltrating and running them, as the Anom operation demonstrated.