How a Mexican Drug Cartel Used Encryption and a Fake Website to Launder Millions Patrick Howell O'Neill - The Daily Dot
go to original October 18, 2016

La Corporacion attempted to use encryption to hide its communications, but it was already too late.

In a meeting with his favorite money launderer of the moment, Alejandro Javier Rodriguez-Jimenez laid down the new rules: All communications relating to the cartel they worked for would now go through encrypted apps, and emails would be saved to draft in a shared account.

The “save to draft” strategy is an old one by internet standards. You and a partner share the password to an email account; instead of sending out emails to be noticed and intercepted, you hide them quietly in the draft folder. It’s well-known to law enforcement and considered amateurish and insecure. The strategy was most famously used by former CIA Director David Petraeus and Paula Broadwell, his biographer and mistress, but it's been in wide usage for over a decade at least since Al Qaeda popularized the trick in the early 2000s.

Encryption is a bit more modern. Cryptography itself is ancient, of course, but the kind of cutting-edge encryption that makes it easy to protect texts, photos, and calls has really only emerged in the wake of Edward Snowden’s NSA leaks.

Those efforts were meant to protect the secret conversations between them. It would ultimately prove too little, too late, as Jimenez would be arrested not long after that meeting. Newly unsealed indictments against him and the high-level leaders of the organization he worked for, however, shed rare light on how modern drug dealers leverage the internet and encryption to their benefit.

Jimenez worked for an international drug-smuggling and money-laundering operation called “La Corporacion” (“The Corporation”). It moved hundreds of kilograms of narcotics across borders and oceans in just a few years, laundering hundreds of millions of dollars in the process, according to federal testimony.

The man throned atop La Corporacion was Roberto Ponce-Rocha, but most people referred to him by his nickname, Paco Ulysses. Ulysses is the wanderer of ancient myth, Paco is slang for cocaine paste. Ponce-Rocha has roots in the Beltran-Levya Cartel, a once-powerful Mexican organized crime syndicate that has been obliterated in recent years by rival cartels and law enforcement, though the line between the two can sometimes blur in Mexico.

Read the rest at The Daily Dot

Photo: Couperfield/Shutterstock/Remix by Jason Reed

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