From the depths of an old German military bunker, an eccentric Dutchman known as Xennt built a dark-web empire beloved by hundreds of cybercriminals.
Around the time of Van der Loos’s visit to the bunker, Nicola Tallant, an Irish crime reporter from the, also arrived in Traben-Trarbach. She has a reputation for writing juicy, exclusive stories about Irish criminals. In 2015, she received a tip from a source that a major Irish drug dealer, George Mitchell, had moved from southern Spain to Traben-Trarbach, in order to work on an encrypted-phone business with Xennt.
Mitchell had known Xennt for many years, at least from the time of Mitchell’s arrest for handling stolen computer parts, in 1998. Martijn Burger, the businessman once involved in the Public Root movement, remembers Xennt and Mitchell spending time together around the turn of the millennium. Back then, Burger did not know of Mitchell’s status in the criminal world, and teasingly called him Charlie Chaplin, because of his gait.
Providing or using an encrypted phone is not illegal in Europe or in America, but the devices appear to be used predominantly for illegal activities, and prosecutors have begun finding ways to break up some encrypted networks. In March, 2019, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of California brought racketeering-conspiracy charges against Vincent Ramos, the C.E.O. of a Canadian company called Phantom Secure.
Many of Xennt’s initial encrypted-phone customers were in Ireland; his market subsequently spread throughout Europe. Xennt told me that his phone business was more lucrative than his hosting business, although the extent of its profitability is hard to assess without seeing a balance sheet. The F.B.I.
The German police’s interest in CyberBunker intensified after the sighting of Mitchell in 2015. They suspected that he might be the guiding figure behind a large criminal enterprise, based in the bunker. A judge allowed the police to tap sixteen of Mitchell’s non-encrypted phones. But, despite glimpses into his criminal dealings, including mentions of shipments of “oranges”—which the police assumed was a coded reference to drugs—there was never enough evidence to charge Mitchell with a crime.
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