Fake news and fabricated profiles: How an underground Israeli company rigged elections in several countries

An underground Israeli company expert in managing social networks was used to it influence dozens of elections around the world, especially in Africa, but also in other cases in Mexico and Spain. It was revealed by an international group of investigative journalists, in a number of media outlets in several countries.

The company, without legal existence, called by journalists “Team Jorge”, following the pseudonym of one of its managers, Tal Hanan, is composed of former members of the Israeli security servicesaccording to information revealed Wednesday by the group Forbidden Stories.

Three journalists from the group presented themselves as possible clients to gather information for several months on “Team Jorge”.

The facility claims to have “he intervened in 33 electoral campaigns at the presidential level,” reported Radio France, where one of the undercover journalists works.

The former spies turned to spreading false information to manipulate voters and influence the outcome.

Of those 33 campaigns, another official told insiders, “two-thirds (took place) in Anglophone and Francophone Africa, 27 were successful.”

Handling in Mexico and Spain

In Mexico, the company would have intervened on behalf of Tomás Zerón, a former official of that country under investigation for the disappearance of 43 students in 2014, says the site Forbidden Stories.

Zerón, head of the Criminal Investigation Agency from 2013 to 2016, is accused of kidnapping, torture and manipulation of evidence in the case of the disappearance of young people from Ayotzinapa (in the state of Guerrero).

Implicated in the takeover of the Pegasus spy program by the Mexican authorities, Zerón is currently on the run in Israel, which refuses his extradition.

And in Spain, “Team Jorge” would have intervened in the referendum, not recognized by the Spanish government, organized by Catalan separatists in 2014, adds Radio France.

For its activities, the company has developed “for six years a digital platform”, AIMS, which has allowed it to create countless fake social media accounts and above all activate and nourish them, explains the group of researchers.

At the beginning of January 2023, the system used 39,213 fake profiles, “which can be consulted in a sort of catalogue”. In it there are “avatars of all ethnicities, nationalities, genders, singles or couples… Their faces are portraits of real people taken from the internet, and their patronymics, the combination of thousands of surnames and first names stored in a bank data,” according to Radio France.

“To demonstrate the effectiveness of one of his tools, Jorge took over the messaging systems of several high-level African officials. ‘Here we are,’ he told reporters who saw two Gmail accounts, a Google Drive and a directory, as well as a number of Telegram accounts,” says Forbidden Stories.

Once infiltrated into the systems, Jorge could “pretend to be the owner and have exchanges with his contacts,” add those responsible for the investigation.

The company can also carry out operations to put pressure on important people in decision-making processes or to journalists, on behalf of their clients.

Forbidden Stories is a network of investigative journalists created in 2017. It is this consortium that uncovered the Israeli spy program Pegasus scandal in 2021.

Source: AFP