The Sinaloa Cartel used Mexico City’s camera system to track the whereabouts of FBI agents in Mexico as a way to find who they met with, a new report by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) revealed. The cartel also carried out other hacking efforts targeting potential informants who were intimidated or killed.
The revelations were part of an audit on the FBI’s “efforts to mitigate the effects of ubiquitous technical surveillance.”
One of the examples listed by the OIG revealed that in 2018, the Sinaloa Cartel hired a hacker who provided “a menu of services.” In one incident, the hacker exploited the cell phone of an Assistant Legal Attaché (ALAT), one of the highest-ranking FBI agents in Mexico City. The hacker was able to hack the call information, learning who he called or received calls from, as well as his geolocation data to track him.
A second hard-hitting revelation pointed to the hacker using Mexico City’s police surveillance camera system to track down the ALAT as he moved through the city and then worked to identify the people he met with. The report noted that the Sinaloa Cartel then intimidated and at times killed “potential informants.”
The revelations in the report come days after the U.S. Department of the Treasury publicly identified and moved to sanction two Mexican banks and one brokerage firm for allegedly having laundered millions for various drug cartels and also having helped them move money to China to pay for fentanyl precursors. As Breitbart Texas reported, Mexico’s government has since defended the financial institutions and attempted to discredit U.S. Treasury officials, claiming that there is no evidence to support those accusations.
Mexican news outlets have since revealed that the brokerage firm targeted by the U.S. Treasury, Vector Casa de Bolsa, is owned by Alfonso Romo, a politician who served as the chief of staff for former Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
Ildefonso Ortiz is an award-winning journalist with Breitbart News Foundation. He co-founded Breitbart News Foundation’s Cartel Chronicles project with Brandon Darby and senior Breitbart management. You can follow him on Twitter and on Facebook. He can be contacted at [email protected].
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