Arcane OS

2021: Introduction of smartphones with Arcane OS in the secondary market

July 13, 2021 it became known about the appearance in the secondary market of smartphones running the Arcane operating system, developed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

With the help of such devices, the FBI carried out an operation that led to hundreds of arrests. The essence of the operation was that law enforcement agencies created a real company that was engaged in the sale of super-secure smartphones with the Android operating system to those people for whom privacy is of paramount importance, which mainly meant criminals.

On these phones was an application called Anom, which was the main feature of a fake company. Anom is a hidden messaging application that the FBI advertised as safe and confidential. Of course, the criminals who bought the phones used Anom to coordinate criminal activities. But the problem was that Anom was not private, and literally all the information came from it to law enforcement agencies. Armed with tons of evidence, the FBI arrested hundreds of criminals. This has become one of the most successful operations in recent times.

On the secondary market appeared smartphones with the Arcane OS from the FBI

Of course, not everyone who bought the phone used it for criminal activity. It turned out that some phones hit secondary market sites like Craigslist in the United States. People buy these phones, thinking that these are ordinary Android phones at a favorable price for business negotiations or other purposes. Most of these phones are models of the Google Pixel A series (Pixel 4a and Pixel 3a).

Gadgets do not come with Pixel UI over Android. Instead, they come with a custom ROM known as the Arcane operating system. Little is known about the origin of Arcane, but, apparently, it makes most of the functions of the phone absolutely useless.

After all, most of the pre-installed applications on the phone simply do not work. For example, if you click on the Instagram app, nothing will happen and the app will not open. The entire operating system exists to create the illusion that the phone works normally and looks like all its brethren. After rebooting, you enter a special PIN, after which a second, but still normal-looking main screen appears. If you open the calculator application on this screen, the Anom application opens, after which you can log in and start communicating.

In the settings there was a shortcut for cleaning the entire phone (indicated by an icon similar to a paper destroyer). The whole point of the FBI phones was to persuade criminals to use Anom under the pretext that you can safely talk about anything there.^[1]

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