Tech

The Assassination of Blogger Martin Kok

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The tale started with an encrypted phone company, Morroccan gangsters, the Scottish mafia, and a blogger. It ended with an assassination outside of a sex club in Amsterdam.

Last week, Motherboard reporter Joseph Cox broke the news that MPC—a Scottish company that hawked special encrypted phones that could evade police surveillance—had been connected to the murder of crime blogger Martin Kok. Kok was a former criminal himself who had previously served a jail sentence for two murders.

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Kok’s crime blogging had gotten him on the wrong side of the Gillespie brothers, two Scots who are still operating a highly sophisticated drug and gun running operation connected to South American cartels, as well as Morroccan gangster associates. They allegedly hatched a successful plan to kill him in December 2016.

On this week’s episode of CYBER, Cox goes into detail about how this criminal syndicate carried out Kok’s murder, and what it means for crime in 2019 when the mafia isn’t buying encrypted phones, but making them for itself.