Mitto AG

History

2021: Suspicion of selling user surveillance data

On December 6, 2021, information appeared that the developer of the Mitto messenger was convicted of selling data to monitor users. The co-founder of the company, which tech giants, including Google and Twitter, trusted to transfer the secret passwords of their customers. Ultimately, the service management helped various governments secretly monitor and track users' mobile phones, Bloomberg reported citing former employees and customers.

Mitto messenger developer convicted of selling data to monitor users by authorities

Since its founding in 2013, Mitto has established itself as a provider of automatic text messages for purposes such as promotions, meeting reminders and security codes. These short messages were needed to sign in to online accounts, the company told its customers in the framework of marketing approaches that emails are more likely to be read and used by third parties than text messages. The company has developed its business by establishing relations with telecom operators in more than 100 countries. Mitto made deals that allowed it to deliver text messages to billions of phones in most parts of the world, including countries that Western companies find difficult to infiltrate, such as Iran and Afghanistan.

According to Mitto documents and former employees, the company attracted major tech giants as customers, including Google, Twitter, WhatsApp, Microsoft, LinkedIn and the Telegram messaging application, as well as Chinese companies TikTok, Tencent and Alibaba. But an investigation by Bloomberg, conducted in collaboration with the London Bureau of Investigative Journalism, shows that the company's co-founder and chief operating officer Ilya Gorelik provided another service, namely, selling access to Mitto networks to secretly locate people through their mobile phones. According to four former employees of the company, the fact that Mitto networks are also used for surveillance was not known either to the company's technology customers or mobile operators with whom the company works to distribute its text messages and other communications. According to these employees and a number of other government sources, only a small number of people in Mitto were aware of the existence of an alternative service. According to employees, the head Ilya Gorelik sold this service to companies engaged in surveillance technologies, which, in turn, entered into contracts with government agencies of various countries.^[1]

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