An Israeli clandestine voterigging company on social media has been used to influence dozens of elections around the world, mostly in Africa but also in other cases in Mexico and Spain, a group of investigative journalists reveals.
The company without legal existence, dubbed “Team Jorge” by journalists and following the pseudonym of one of its managers, Tal Hanan, is made up of former members of the Israeli security services, according to information published this Wednesday (15), dated collective forbidden stories.
Three journalists from the group posed as potential clients to gather information about “Team Jorge” for several months.
The structure claims to have “acted in 33 presidentiallevel election campaigns,” he told his fake clients, according to Radio France, where one of the undercover reporters works.
Of the 33 campaigns, another official interviewed by journalists reported, “twothirds of them took place in Anglophone and Francophone Africa, and 27 were successful.”
In Mexico, the company was acting on behalf of Tomás Zerón, a former government official under investigation in the disappearance of 43 students in 2014, according to the website Forbidden Stories.
Zerón, head of the criminal investigation department from 2013 to 2016, is accused of kidnapping, torture and evidence tampering in the disappearance of young people from Ayotzinapa, a town in Guerrero state.
Zerón is involved in the Mexican authorities’ takeover of the Pegasus spy program and is at large in Israel, which has refused to extradite him.
And in Spain, according to Radio France’s website, “Team Jorge” would have influenced the Spanish government’s unrecognized referendum organized by Catalan separatists in 2014.
Almost 40,000 fake profiles
For its activities, the company has “developed a digital platform for over six years”, AIMS, which has made it possible to create numerous fake accounts in social networks and, above all, to activate and feed them, explains the collective.
Since January 2023, the system has seen 39,213 fake profiles “that you could see in a kind of catalogue”. In it, there are “avatars of all ethnicities, nationalities, genders, single or married… Their faces are portraits of real people from the internet, and their patronymics are the combination of thousands of first and last names stored in a database of data,” according to Radio France.
“To demonstrate the effectiveness of one of his tools, Jorge took control of the intelligence systems of several senior African officials. ‘We’re on it,’ he told journalists who saw two Gmail accounts, a Google Drive and a directory, as well as a number of Telegram accounts,” reports Forbidden Stories.
Once in the systems, Jorge was able to “pose as the owner and chat with his contacts,” the collective adds.
The company may also launch operations to lobby key decision makers or journalists on behalf of its clients.
Forbidden Stories is a network of investigative journalists founded in 2017.