A clandestine Israeli company, specializing in electoral manipulation, in particular via social networks, has been used to influence dozens of elections around the world, particularly in Africa, according to the collective of investigative journalists Forbidden Stories.
The company, without legal existence, nicknamed “Team Jorge” by journalists, because of the pseudonym of one of its leaders, Tal Hanan, is made up of former members of the Israeli security services according to the revelations of the collective on Wednesday. Its various sponsors have not been identified.
Three members of Forbidden Stories, a journalist from Radio France, one from the Israeli daily Ha’aretz and another from the Israeli newspaper The Markerpretended to be potential customers to gather information about “Team Jorge” for several months.
Jorge was already involved in the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018, named after this company accused of having analyzed very large volumes of data to sell influence tools used in particular by Donald Trump.
With his new structure, Jorge claims to have “intervened in 33 electoral campaigns at the presidential level”, he told his fake clients, according to Radio France.
Of these 33 campaigns, another official told them, “two thirds of them (took place) in Anglophone and Francophone Africa. 27 were a success”.
In Europe, the company would have intervened in the referendum, not recognized by the Spanish government, organized by the Catalan separatists in 2014, according to the site of Radio France.
In Africa, “we can confirm that during the summer of 2022, as the Kenyan presidential election approached, Jorge became interested in the accounts of relatives of future President William Ruto, Dennis Itumbi and Davis Chirchir, members of his campaign team, according to the Forbidden Stories site.
39,213 fake profiles
For its activities, the company has in particular developed “for six years a digital platform”, AIMS (Advanced Impact Media Solutions in English, or “advanced solutions for media impact”), which allows it to create false accounts on the Internet at will. social networks, but also and above all to activate them, to animate them to give them a veneer of existence, explains the collective.
“At the beginning of January 2023, the system exploited 39,213 different fake profiles, which can be consulted in a sort of catalog. There are avatars of all ethnicities and nationalities, of all genders, single or in couple… Their faces are portraits of real people drawn from the Internet, and their surnames, the combination of thousands of first and last names stored in a database. data,” according to the Radio France website.
According to the collective, the company also resorts to spying on key figures, in particular by placing them on wiretapping, or hacking.
“To demonstrate the effectiveness of one of his tools, Jorge took control of the messaging systems of several high-level African officials. “We’re in it,” he told reporters who saw two Gmail accounts, a Google Drive and a directory as well as a series of Telegram accounts,” according to Forbidden Stories.
“Once infiltrated into the systems, Jorge was able to impersonate the owner to have exchanges with his contacts. Jorge sent messages to victims’ relations from the hacked Telegram accounts,” the site adds.
The company can also carry out actions of influence, lobbying with decision-makers or journalists on behalf of its various clients.
The collective affirms for example that this is the case of a journalist from the French news channel BFM TV, recently laid off after having broadcast without respecting the procedures of briefs relating to the Russian oligarchs, or to Qatar, who would have been “provided turnkey on behalf of foreign customers”, according to the investigative consortium.
One of these briefs, on the difficulties of the yachting industry in Monaco since the imposition of international sanctions on Russia and its nationals, for example suggests that the objective is to criticize the sanctions policy of European countries. .
Forbidden Stories is a network of investigative journalists created in 2017. Its mission is to continue the work of other journalists who are threatened, imprisoned or murdered.
It was this consortium that sparked the Israeli Pegasus spyware scandal in 2021.