Encrypted Phone ‘Sky’ Linked to Murder-for-Hire Plot in Maryland

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"An infamous drug trafficker who acts as an arm of the Iranian state, and two alleged Canadian hitmen, one being a member of the Hells Angels motorcycle club, planned a murder-for-hire plot on U.S. soil that targeted two people, including an Iranian defector, according to newly unsealed court records. The group used the encrypted phone network Sky, according to the records.

The case shows state-connected figures allegedly used Sky, which traditionally has been a hotbed for drug traffickers and other top tier organized criminals. Corruption was a common sight on platforms similar to Sky, but it’s rare to see such a clear example of a state-powered criminal network using the platform. This is also one of only a few cases involving Sky messages being brought to prosecution inside the U.S.

Although the new indictment quotes Sky messages allegedly sent between members of the murder-for-hire gang, it does not explicitly say whether these messages were sourced through European authorities’ earlier hacking of Sky or some other method. A spokesperson for the U.S. District of Minnesota, where the case is filed, declined to answer whether this case used messages taken as part of that earlier operation.

Damion Patrick John Ryan and Adam Richard Pearson, two Canadian nationals, participated in a plot to murder two residents in Maryland. Ryan is listed as a “full-patch member of the outlaw Hells Angels Motorcycle Club,” and the indictment says he was tasked with pulling together a team of gunmen to travel to Maryland and commit the murders.

The indictment does not name the victims, but says that “Victim 1 defected from Iran and, together with Victim 2, fled to the United States.” The indictment also mentions an unidentified accomplice in Iran labeled as Co-Conspirator 1 that gave Ryan the task. Pearson, meanwhile, was living in the District of Minnesota under an assumed name, the indictment adds. The final defendant, Naji Sharifi Zindashti, also known as “Big” and “Big Guy,” is a drug trafficker based in Iran. In an announcement from the U.S. Treasury Department published alongside the indictment, the agency described Zindashti as leading a network that “operates at the behest of Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS).” The agency’s Office of Foreign Assets (OFAC) and the United Kingdom have sanctioned members of Zindashti’s network in response, according to the announcement.

“Iranian security forces protect Zindashti and his criminal empire, enabling Zindashti to thrive in the country’s drug market and live a life of luxury while his network exports the regime’s repression, carrying out heinous operations on the government’s behalf,” the announcement reads.

Starting in December 2020, Zindashti and Ryan spoke across Sky about “jobs,” “equipment,” “tools,” and how to “make some money,” according to the indictment. Ryan said that doing a job in the U.S. was challenging but that he “might have someone to do it.”

“East coast is very hard for me. West I can do more and have more options,” Ryan wrote according to the indictment. Ryan asked Zindashti for a car and “equipment.”

Ryan then messaged Pearson over Sky, asking for assistance for a “job” in Maryland, the indictment continues. Pearson replied that he had people he trusted and that “shooting is probably easiest thing for them,” and that he may charge more than $100,000 for the hit. In response to Ryan saying this job needed “to be over kill lol,” Pearson said he would encourage the recruits to shoot the target in the head to make an example of them, and said that if the job was time sensitive, he could do it himself, the indictment says. “We gotta erase his head from his torso,” Pearson said, conveying what he would tell his recruits.

Eventually, Ryan and Zindashti agreed on a payment of $350,000, and $20,000 to cover travel expenses, the indictment says. Zindashti then handed Ryan over to the unnamed Co-Conspitrator 1 based in Iran, with messages then pinging between the two of them.

“We have a 4 man team ready,” Ryan wrote to the co-conspirator, who then sent photos of the targets, the male Iranian defector and a woman. They also sent two maps, each highlighting the known address of the victims, the indictment says. Months later in March 2021, the pair continued to communicate, and the co-conspirator facilitated the $20,000 payment for expenses.

Ryan and Pearson are already incarcerated abroad on unrelated criminal matters, the Treasury Department’s announcement reads. Both were designated by the agency too, it adds.

The Sky Connection

“To plan the murders of the Victims, the defendants and Co-Conspirator 1 used an end-to-end encrypted communication service called ‘SkyECC’,” the indictment reads, using one of the brand names linked to Sky. The company is also affiliated with the name Sky Global. The communications on Sky touched on every aspect of the operation, including the maps and photos of the targets, payment, and recruitment, the indictment says.

Sky differs from consumer-access encrypted chat platforms such as Signal or WhatsApp in that Sky’s resellers charged thousands of dollars for a subscription to the Sky network. This is a common business model in the encrypted phone industry, with subscribers getting a handset, an account on the encrypted app itself, and data rolled into one.

Some of these companies deliberately engineer and market their products for avoiding law enforcement surveillance. MPC was a company made by two Scottish drug traffickers first to facilitate their own operations before becoming a business opportunity in its own right. A Dutch crime-focused blog ran adverts for another company called Encrochat. Others exist in an incredibly murky area, with their products becoming gadgets of choice for drug traffickers but not necessarily marketing explicitly to them, at least not publicly. They include No. 1 BC, a phone that is used by senior members of the Italian mafia.

Sky sits somewhere in the middle of that narrow spectrum. Court records from an earlier case showed that Sky did try to weed criminals off its platform. But crucially, the messages and other material introduced as part of that case were dated only after the FBI shut down a similar company called Phantom Secure in 2018.

Over the last several years, law enforcement agencies around the world have participated in sophisticated operations against encrypted phone companies. There was Encrochat, where French military police hacked into around 30,000 devices by pushing a malicious update, gathering messages, and then providing those communications to counterparts across Europe and the United Kingdom. There was also Anom, the encrypted phone company that gained popularity in the underground but which was secretly run by the FBI, allowing the agency unfettered access to the phones’ messages. And, of relevance to this murder-for-hire case, authorities managed to obtain a colossal half a billion messages from Sky that were supposed to be secure. In 2021, U.S. authorities indicted Jean-Francois Eap, the CEO of Sky, with charges under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO). In other words, authorities saw Sky as a criminal entity in its own right.

Regardless, cases linked to these encrypted phones rarely end up with prosecutions in the U.S. One other Sky example is that of Ylli Didani, the alleged leader of a gang that had connections to Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Chile, and Brazil. At one point, Didani’s gang allegedly paid a company to create a special type of drug carrying underwater drone, according to other court records. The 3 to 4 foot torpedo shaped vessel had magnets that would latch onto the base of a cargo ship, before detaching itself at the operator’s command. The drone would then broadcast its GPS location to its owners who would then come and pick up the drone, and its contents.

“I have a fishing boat here,” one of the gang’s messages sent over Sky read. “We unlock the torpedo 100miles [off] shore.”

Didani was the one charged in that case, but authorities allege he was financed by eccentric Michigan-based telecommunications CEO and millionaire Marty Tibbitts, who died in a plane crash in 2018.

A Signal message sent by 404 Media to Eap, the CEO of Sky, went undelivered. A lawyer who has worked on his behalf, Ashwin Ram, did not respond to an emailed request for comment."