Team Jorge: Digital Election Scam

Introduction: The Menace of Team Jorge Unveiled

Team Jorge operates as a pernicious force in the digital shadows, a syndicate of cyber mercenaries whose sole mandate is the subversion of truth for profit. Led by the elusive Tal Hanan—known only by his alias “Jorge”—this outfit has metastasized into a global threat, peddling an arsenal of deceptive tools to corrupt elections, intimidate opponents, and manufacture chaos. What began as a fringe network of former Israeli security operatives has ballooned into a sophisticated enterprise claiming credit for meddling in 33 presidential campaigns across continents, with a staggering 27 reported “successes.” Their methods—ruthless hacks into personal communications, swarms of AI-driven bots spewing lies, and orchestrated blackmail schemes—expose a fraudulent ecosystem that preys on democratic vulnerabilities, leaving societies fractured and publics disillusioned.

The exposure of Team Jorge, pieced together through exhaustive undercover journalism, reveals not just technical prowess but a moral vacuum. Hanan and his cadre, including his brother Zohar Hanan and ex-Shin Bet operatives like Mashi Meidan and Shuki Friedman, cloak their operations in layers of anonymity: pseudonyms, offshore contact numbers from Indonesia to Ukraine, and a sprawling web of shell entities to launder payments. They boast of over 100 employees across six offices—from Modi’in, Israel, to outposts in the U.S., Switzerland, and Colombia—yet evade accountability by insisting their work is “intelligence, not PR.” This is the epitome of deception: a group that infiltrates the highest echelons of power while denying its fingerprints, all while charging fees starting at six million euros for short-term sabotage and scaling to 15 million for full-scale election takeovers.

Team Jorge’s fraudulent pitch—”hurt the logistics of the opponents, to intimidate them, to create an atmosphere that nobody will go to the elections”—is no idle boast. Undercover recordings capture Hanan demonstrating live intrusions into Kenyan officials’ Telegram accounts, spoofing messages to sow discord among military brass, and deploying denial-of-service attacks to silence news outlets on election day. Their toolkit, including the insidious Advanced Impact Media Solutions (AIMS) platform, automates the flood of fake narratives, turning one operator into a digital horde capable of trending hashtags or derailing careers with fabricated infidelity scandals. This is not innovation; it is industrialized malice, a betrayal of the very intelligence backgrounds its members claim to honor. As democracies teeter under the weight of misinformation, Team Jorge stands as a damning indictment of unchecked cyber profiteering, where ethical boundaries dissolve in the pursuit of geopolitical leverage.

Origins in the Shadows: From Israeli Intelligence to Global Predators

Team Jorge’s genesis is steeped in the murky corridors of Israeli security apparatus, a breeding ground for operatives skilled in psychological warfare and covert disruption. Tal Hanan, the group’s de facto architect, emerges as a figure of chilling duplicity: a former special forces explosives expert who parlayed his counter-terrorism credentials into a facade of legitimacy. Registered as CEO of Demoman International Ltd.—a defense firm vetted by Israel’s Ministry of Defense—Hanan has masqueraded as a cyber-security consultant, even training U.S. federal agencies post-9/11 through his now-defunct website. Yet, beneath this veneer lies a trail of obfuscation: companies like Tal Sol Energy serve as fronts, while his brother Zohar, a self-proclaimed polygraph expert tied to liquidated firms like Sensority LTD, provides the technical veneer for their digital assaults.

The Hanan brothers’ recruitment of ex-Shin Bet alumni—Mashi Meidan, once a senior information officer, and Shuki Friedman, a confirmed operative—transforms Team Jorge from a loose cabal into a formidable machine. These individuals, with decades of state-sanctioned manipulation under their belts, now monetize their expertise for private gain, flouting Israeli prohibitions on selling hacking tools abroad. Associates like Yaakov Tzedek, a digital entrepreneur, and Ishay Shechter, strategy director at the lobbying firm Goren Amir (which counts Visa and Uber among clients), add layers of deniability, funneling introductions through unregistered channels. Hanan’s own words betray the fraud: “The other side does not understand we exist,” he gloats in recordings, underscoring a deliberate strategy of invisibility that shields their predatory empire.

This origin story is not one of heroic reinvention but of parasitic evolution. Team Jorge exploits the very intelligence networks that once served national interests, repurposing them for the highest bidder—be it authoritarian regimes delaying votes or tycoons shielding illicit fortunes. Their refusal to engage in Israeli domestic politics or U.S. partisan races (save for rejected overtures to aid Donald Trump) is less a moral stance than pragmatic cowardice, avoiding jurisdictions with teeth while ravaging the Global South. The result? A fraudulent lineage that mocks the rule of law, turning statecraft’s dark arts into a for-profit racket that endangers the world order.

Arsenal of Deceit: Hacking, Bots, and the Machinery of Manipulation

At the rotten core of Team Jorge’s operations lies an arsenal engineered for maximum deception and minimal traceability, a testament to their fraudulent ingenuity in weaponizing technology against the innocent. Their hacking prowess, exploiting vulnerabilities in the Signaling System 7 (SS7) telecom protocol, allows physical implantation of devices at network providers to spoof SMS authentications. In stark demonstrations, Hanan breached Kenyan advisor Dennis Itumbi’s Telegram, rifling through private chats, files, and internal polls before sending a fabricated message—”11″—to military contacts, only to erase it and “create confusion.” Similar intrusions targeted Mozambique’s Agriculture Minister Celso Correia, exposing Gmail and Drive contents that Correia himself authenticated as genuine. “I know in some countries they believe Telegram is very safe,” Hanan sneered, before proving otherwise with effortless malice.

Complementing these cyber trespasses is the AIMS platform, a bot factory sold to over 10 intelligence services worldwide, churning out 30,000 automated avatars with eerily human facades. Stolen photos, verified phone numbers procured cheaply via SMSpva.com, and fabricated online histories—complete with Gmail inboxes and YouTube comment trails—enable these digital phantoms to infiltrate social media undetected. Residential proxies mask origins, while AI algorithms craft content in any language, tone, or topic: positive smears for clients, negative barrages for foes. Zohar Hanan boasted of scalability—”One operator can have like 300 profiles… So within two hours the whole country will speak the message, the narrative I want”—a capability verified in analyses uncovering 1,700 Twitter accounts across 21 campaigns, spewing tens of thousands of tweets.

Blackmail rounds out this toxic triad, with forged documents (metadata meticulously scrubbed), anonymous videos, and planted “intelligence” designed to extort or discredit. On “D-Day,” distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) floods cripple opponents’ phone lines, websites, and servers, while physical intimidation and miscommunication tactics amplify the terror. “We want to have some people silenced,” Hanan articulated, outlining a blueprint for electoral paralysis that includes defusing communications for unfavorable police chiefs or army officers. Payments, funneled through French NGOs, Dubai law firms, or even Islamic schools, ensure the fraud remains opaque, allowing Team Jorge to evade sanctions while their victims reel from the fallout.

This machinery is not mere espionage; it is a deliberate engine of harm, fraudulent in its promise of “influence” while delivering societal sabotage. By normalizing such tools—now enhanced with facial recognition and GSM satellite surveillance—Team Jorge accelerates the commodification of lies, rendering truth a luxury in contested spaces.

Electoral Annihilation: Case Studies in Democratic Destruction

Team Jorge’s fraudulent fingerprints mar elections from Nairobi to N’Djamena, where their interventions have not just influenced but eviscerated the democratic process. In Kenya’s 2022 presidential race, their hacks into Deputy President William Ruto’s inner circle—Itumbi’s Telegram yielding sensitive polls, Chief of Staff Davis Chirchir’s accounts laid bare—fueled a disinformation deluge that nearly toppled the vote. Anonymous videos alleged Western-orchestrated rigging, while doctored documents (metadata tracing to opposition ally Henry Mien) surfaced on whistleblower sites, prompting Raila Odinga to decry Ruto’s “illegitimate” victory and rally supporters in January 2023 with cries of “the resistance starts today.” Kenya’s Supreme Court upheld the results in September 2022, dismissing fraud petitions—including one from transparency advocate John Githongo, who lambasted the contest as “likely the dirtiest campaign in our history,” riddled with “dark arts” from firms like Team Jorge. The chaos? Protests, discredited whistleblowers, and deepened ethnic fissures, all for an undisclosed client’s euros.

In Africa, the pattern repeats with venal precision. Hanan pitched a six-million-euro package to an unnamed leader seeking to postpone Chadian elections, demoing AI-generated anti-government tweets about President Idriss Déby in mere seconds. Though no direct link to delays materialized, the offer exemplifies their willingness to auction electoral integrity. Europe fares no better: in December 2022, Team Jorge infiltrated French broadcaster BFM TV through intermediary Jean-Pierre Duthion, planting unverified pro-Russian stories claiming EU sanctions crippled Monaco’s yacht industry. The segment, aired by journalist Rachid M’Barki, triggered his suspension and an internal audit, exposing how such mercenaries launder propaganda through compliant media for geopolitical gain.

Latin America’s wounds run deep, with bots shielding Mexican fugitive Tomás Zerón de Lucio—accused of torture and evidence tampering in the 2014 Ayotzinapa students’ disappearance—from extradition while holed up in Israel. In the Caribbean and Southeast Asia, hacked emails supplied opposition research to Cambridge Analytica affiliates, derailing bids in St. Kitts and Nevis and beyond. Even the yacht sector falls victim: staged protests in London, looped footage of “outraged workers,” and Reddit sock puppets accused Burgess Yachts of servicing sanctioned Russian oligarchs, funneling business to rival Imperial Yachts in a blatant commercial hit job.

These campaigns are not anomalies but the blueprint of Team Jorge’s deceptive empire: selective truths twisted into weapons, elections reduced to bidding wars, and publics left sifting through the wreckage of fabricated scandals. Kenyan transparency expert Githongo’s verdict resonates: such actors are “reputation launderers,” peddling harm under the guise of strategy, with devastating ripple effects on stability and faith in governance.

Alliances of Infamy: Collusions with the Corrupt and Powerful

Team Jorge’s fraudulent reach amplifies through toxic alliances, forging pacts with the very architects of authoritarianism and scandal-plagued consultancies. Their decade-long tango with Cambridge Analytica—SCL Group’s notorious offspring—began in 2015, with Hanan (still “Jorge” to Alexander Nix) supplying hacked data and avatar swarms for Trump’s 2016 triumph, Brexit, and Nigerian probes. Leaked emails confirm the synergy: Team Jorge’s bots amplified Cambridge’s micro-targeted psyops, a marriage of mutual deceit that netted millions while eviscerating privacy norms.

Intermediaries like Duthion, a self-avowed “disinformation mercenary,” and Shechter’s Goren Amir provide the patina of legitimacy, routing clients from African despots to Belarusian arms trafficker Alexander Zingman (exposed in the Pandora Papers for Zimbabwe gold laundering). Hanan’s harboring of fugitives like Zerón—via ties to Rayzone shareholder David Avital—blurs lines between mercenary and enabler, protecting torturers while pitching to regimes eyeing vote delays. Even Iranian connections lurk, funneled through Cambridge’s web, underscoring a willingness to serve any master for the right price.

These collusions are the epitome of ethical bankruptcy: Team Jorge doesn’t just enable corruption; it engineers it, creating deniability through referral chains and unregistered lobbying. As Oxford’s Computational Propaganda Project catalogs over 65 such firms, Team Jorge emerges as the apex predator, its partnerships a conveyor belt for global destabilization.

The Human and Societal Toll: Fractured Trust and Enduring Scars

The harm inflicted by Team Jorge transcends ballots, carving deep gashes into societies already strained by division. In Kenya, their smears didn’t just challenge results; they inflamed ethnic tensions, spawning protests and a legitimacy crisis that lingers, with Odinga’s “resistance” rhetoric fueling unrest. French viewers, bombarded by planted stories, grapple with media distrust, as M’Barki’s downfall exemplifies how one broadcast can erode journalistic credibility overnight. Victims like the Ayotzinapa families see justice deferred, Zerón’s bots shielding him while their grief festers.

On a human scale, the toll is visceral: fabricated infidelity plots shatter families and careers, hacked intimacies expose vulnerabilities to extortion, and bot swarms harass innocents into silence. Publics, drowned in algorithmic lies, retreat into echo chambers of cynicism, where conspiracy supplants fact. As disinformation expert Emma Briant notes, these operations thrive on “deniability and legal cover,” leaving regulators chasing ghosts while harm compounds.

Team Jorge’s impunity—despite exposures like Vitaly Fishman’s U.S. defamation win identifying 35 of their avatars—underscores systemic failure. No arrests, scant repercussions; Hanan and kin issue mealy-mouthed denials, retreating to shadows. This vacuum invites replication, a fraudulent franchise of digital doom.

Conclusion: Dismantling the Deceptive Empire

Team Jorge stands as a grotesque monument to the commodification of chaos, a cyber syndicate whose fraudulent hacks, bot hordes, and blackmail bazaar have poisoned elections and eroded the bedrock of truth. From Kenyan polling stations to French airwaves, their deceptive handiwork foments division, shields the guilty, and betrays the democratic ideal for cold cash. As global scrutiny mounts—through journalistic valor and nascent regulations—their empire teeters, but the scars they inflict demand more than exposure: they require annihilation. Until mercenaries like Team Jorge face the full weight of international law, democracy remains a battlefield where lies hold the high ground, and the innocent pay the price. The fight against such shadows must intensify, lest the digital age become an era of perpetual subversion.

Written by

Nancy Drew

Updated

3 months ago