What's the best phone to do crimes on? (classic)

December 5, 2025·1 hr 3 min·5 clips

A U.S. attorney announces that the FBI developed and operated its own encrypted device company for criminals called Anom.

The setup starts at work. The host uses the ordinary panic of seeing new technology arrive and suddenly change a profession. Then the size of the thing clicks into place. The excerpt says more than 12,000 Anom encrypted devices and services reached over 300 criminal syndicates in more than a hundred countries. That number gives the story its first turn. What sounds like a funny gadget question becomes a story about infrastructure, trust, and the market for secrecy. The FBI is not a side detail. The host points to the central mystery: how federal agents came to start a criminal phone company that international drug smugglers preferred. It is a very Search Engine kind of setup. A dumb-sounding question opens into a bigger one about who is listening. The excerpt keeps treating phones as work tools. Criminals need tools, smugglers need communication, and law enforcement needs a way into systems built to shut them out. Then the word wiretap hits. Not a tiny bug or a lucky intercept, but what the host calls history's most ambitious wiretap. The episode is framed as a rerun too. The cold open calls it a favorite criminal caper with serious twists, which sets the tone without giving away the machinery. There are ads in the excerpt. They break up the story, but the main line stays clear: Anom is the object, the FBI made it, and the messages are what everyone wants. The credits point to the show's style: reported audio, narration, fact-checking, music, and a host who likes simple questions that keep getting stranger. The fun is in the reveal. A listener comes for the tech-crime hook and stays for the moment the phone company turns out to be the trap.

As heard by us

A criminal caper that becomes a story about surveillance and technology reshaping the job.

It begins like a criminal caper, then opens into a larger story about surveillance, trust, and the way technology can reshape a job. The episode lets the setup unfold at a measured pace before widening to the FBI's criminal phone company and what the show calls history's most…

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Listen for the FBI's fake criminal phone company and the sting behind it.

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