When investigators searched dozens of apartments in Hesse a year ago in June, drug trafficking in the Rhine-Main area came to a standstill for at least a day.

Operation Trojan Shield is still considered to be the greatest blow in the fight against organized crime.

And even a year later, the data that FBI investigators collected over months sounds like fiction: For the first time, it was possible to overhear communications between members of criminal gangs on a large scale by foisting crafted mobile phones on the underworld.

Catherine Iskandar

Responsible editor for the "Rhein-Main" department of the Sunday newspaper.

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In most cases, the conversations that the investigators overheard from then on were about the logistics of drug trafficking.

The question of whether delivery times can be met.

How will it be delivered.

And whether there are bottlenecks or other difficulties that need to be solved.

This also included forcing people who didn't follow the rules to cooperate through violence - up to and including targeted killing in order to "punish" someone.

The criminals only spoke so openly to each other because they thought their communications were encrypted.

But the crypto cell phone provider “Anom” was what the name of the operation betrayed: a Trojan horse.