Federal prosecutors in San Diego Monday announced the seizure of nearly $4 million generated by a criminal enterprise that facilitated the transnational importation and distribution of narcotics through the sale and service of encrypted communications devices.
The seized funds were generated by Phantom Secure, a Canada-based company that advertised and sold devices it alleged were impervious to decryption, wiretapping or legal third-party records requests and would destroy evidence contained within the devices if they were compromised.
Four bank accounts containing $3,971,468.40 linked to the sale of Phantom Secure devices were seized in Singapore and have since been forfeited as proceeds of criminal activity and repatriated to the United States, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
The company’s CEO, Vincent Ramos, was indicted by a federal grand jury in 2018. He pleaded guilty to a racketeering conspiracy count and was sentenced last year to nine years in prison, in addition to agreeing to an $80 million forfeiture money judgment and the forfeiture of tens of millions of dollars in assets, which included the money repatriated from Singapore.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office said narcotics traffickers were supplied with the encrypted devices, which helped facilitate the distribution of cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine around the world, including in Australia, Canada, Europe, Mexico, Thailand and the United States.
Prosecutors say Ramos and others maintained Phantom Secure servers in Panama and Hong Kong, but used virtual proxy servers to disguise the servers’ physical location. The company remotely deleted or wiped devices seized by law enforcement, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
Prosecutors allege Ramos once boasted about the devices’ effectiveness upon reading a 2014 news article stating that Phantom Secure devices were used to coordinate an unspecified gangland murder.
“This is the best verification on what we have been saying all along — proven and effective for now over nine years,” he wrote, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. “It is the highest level of authority confirming our effectiveness. It can’t get better than that.”
San Diego’s U.S. Attorney Robert Brewer said: “As a result of this groundbreaking prosecution, the network has been shut down, its founder has been brought to justice, and its money is being identified and forfeited to help victims and witnesses of crime.”
— City News Service
