How FBI and Australian police built and marketed the An0m chat service for criminals, which cost $1,700 for a handset and $1,250 for an annual subscription
Billed as the most secure phone on the planet, An0m became a viral sensation in the underworld. There was just one problem … Tweets: @evansthecrime , @chey_cobb , @simonparkin , and @awinston Tweets: Jason Evans / @evansthecrime : Fascinating long read on how Aussie and US law enforcement created the An0m secure phone app, put it into the hands of criminal gangs around the world, and then accessed an extraordinary amount of intelligence. (By @SimonParkin for @guardian) https://www.theguardian.com/ ... CyberSec Chey / @chey_cobb : Brilliant law enforcement ploy; questionable ethics ~ Every message sent on An0m phones since its launch had been collected by the Australian Federal Police & the FBI, who had conceived, built, marketed & sold the super-exclusive, supposedly secure phone https://www.theguardian.com/ ... Simon Parkin / @simonparkin : A smartphone costing thousands, but unable to make phone calls, became a viral sensation among alleged criminals. Except An0m was a scheme; law enforcement captured every message sent via the network. How it was done - practically and legally: https://www.theguardian.com/ ... Ali Winston / @awinston : The Anom story is one of the most remarkable and underplayed news items of 2021 https://www.theguardian.com/ ...
Context & Ripple Effects
This feature closes the loop on an operation first reported in June, when the FBI and Australian Federal Police disclosed they had run the An0m encrypted chat service for three-plus years and collected every message sent over it. The backstory matters: after the FBI shut down Phantom Secure, the Canadian privacy-phone company that had become a Sinaloa Cartel communications network, a commercial vacuum opened at the top of the criminal handset market — and An0m was built to fill it.
The new reporting adds the commercial mechanics the initial disclosure lacked: a $1,700 handset plus a $1,250 annual subscription, viral word-of-mouth adoption in the underworld, and active marketing by the agencies themselves. A follow-up showed the hardware outliving the sting, with resold Anom phones exposing the custom ArcaneOS.
First-order effects
- Criminal networks that paid the $1,700/$1,250 price for 'the most secure phone on the planet' handed police a complete record of their traffic, converting a trusted vendor relationship into a mass-intelligence collection system.
Second-order effects
- Trust in the hardened-handset market collapses along vendor lines: buyers can no longer distinguish a legitimate provider from a front, pressuring surviving networks — the same dynamic that let European agencies later infiltrate EncroChat and Sky ECC.
Third-order effects
- If the Phantom Secure-to-An0m sequence repeats, law enforcement's playbook shifts from cracking encryption after the fact to owning or co-opting the platform itself, and every future encrypted-device vendor becomes a potential state asset in its customers' eyes.
The trend: Criminal communications are migrating through a cycle where each compromised or seized network pushes buyers to the next provider — while agencies increasingly prefer to run the replacement rather than break it.