Balkan criminals planned murders using encrypted phones from the Canadian start-up Sky Global

Lalić was known among the Principi as their most tech-savvy member, helping his fellow gangsters set up GPS locators and surveillance cameras when they wanted to tail their enemies. He first started using Sky in 2017 after the gang’s leader, Belivuk, bought him an account as a gift a year earlier. 

“It was the only means of communication — we didn’t use a regular phone,” he told French investigating judges who questioned him last year. (Lalić also described his work for Sky while testifying before a Serbian court about the Principi’s criminal activities in 2022. This story draws on both of these sources.)

Later, he told investigators, he bought his own Sky account from a man he knew only as Ivan, who ran a phone shop on a busy street corner in Belgrade. He then applied to become a reseller by filling out a form on Sky’s website, and was contacted by a person nicknamed “Bee,” who also managed Ivan. (Everyone on Sky used a nickname as well as having a unique numerical PIN — Lalić’s was “Barry Mills,” after the notorious American neo-Nazi prison gang leader.)

Lalić seemed to believe that Bee, who used a skyecc.com email address, worked directly for Sky, but French investigators would later identify him as a senior figure at Global Wireless Solutions, one of Sky’s biggest distribution companies.

(Read more about Sky’s layered set-up, which insulated the company from dealing directly with some of its worst clients.)

Bee told him that Sky had around 70 employees and 800 sales agents around the world, and explained how it would work to become a reseller.

“We talked about sales conditions and capacities,” Lalić said in court. “We reached an agreement in principle, and he insisted that I open a company.”

He decided to set up a firm in the Czech Republic called “Panzerbox,” through which he would conduct his business as a Sky reseller. (Czech corporate records confirm his account. But a Principi boss later ordered Lalić to transfer the Czech company to other members of the group to use for narcotics trafficking, he said, since it was a “clean” company without a record of having been used for crime.)

After Lalić was taken on as a reseller, he said he was “trained by Sky management” on how to use and sell the phones. It was important for him to understand the phone’s capabilities since he would then go on to train end-users.

“We, as agents or distributors, directly trained users and we presented them with all the advantages, that is, the possibilities of the Sky application that they could use to protect themselves from investigative authorities,” he said.

The training initially took place over emails and messages, on both Sky and another encrypted app, Threema. Later, he said, Sky set up a site called the “Sky Learning Academy,” which had “educational materials,” for resellers, as well as tests they were required to take to keep their licenses.

When Lalić was fully onboarded, he got access to a portal that helped him manage the accounts he sold. Since one of his Sky nicknames was “Panzer,” he was given the email address [email protected]. He started a promotional website called Pancersky.com, which was translated into eight languages.

At first Lalić had to charge Sky’s standard prices — around 1,000 euros for a six-month subscription, or 550 euros for three months — but as he acquired more clients, he was allowed to offer discounts.

Eventually, he grew so successful — and was so “responsible and timely,” he boasted in his testimony — that Bee offered him a new title, what he called Sky’s “Balkan representative.” He began to acquire and manage his own stable of resellers, who nurtured their own clientele: “Balkan SKY” in Serbia, “Alfa Pro” in Croatia, “Hugo” in Montenegro, “Joker” in Austria, “Junior” in North Macedonia, Albania, and Switzerland, and “Zeus” in Slovenia. (Their real names are not identified in court files.)

At one point, Lalić said, he was generating 80,000 to 120,000 euros a month for Sky, collecting the money from his agents in cash and sending it to the company. Initially, he used bank transfers, but as the sums grew larger he was instructed to use Bitcoin or other cryptocurrency, routed through an exchange in the Netherlands.

Meanwhile, he remained involved in gang warfare — sometimes even using his position as a reseller to gain an advantage. In 2020, he managed to trick Sky’s technical support into helping him look up several IDs belonging to rival gang members, even though they were not his clients and he should not have been able to see their information. Using this subterfuge, he learned that they were in Greece. He passed this information to his “brothers,” who hunted down the men and killed them.

“At that moment it was a key clue to finding them,” Lalić said of his discovery. “For that, [an associate] promised me a kilogram of cocaine, which he did not pay me.”

Saša Vasilijević

Saša Vasilijević owns an unassuming phone repair shop called iGadgetz in Čačak, a mid-sized town in central Serbia. But his business has involved more than just fixing iPhones: He also sold Sky phones to 1,504 customers between 2016 and 2021, making him the company’s main reseller in the Balkans, according to a French judicial police report.

Unlike Sky’s other Serbian resellers, he keeps a low profile and has left few traces in public records. He has never been convicted of a crime. Local authorities told reporters they had never heard of him. 

But Vasilijević’s Sky messages reveal his familiarity with Serbia’s criminal underworld. A number of them include photographs of weapons or drugs. After examining the material, French investigators concluded that he was “a reseller affiliated with the Serbian mafia.”

While other resellers in Serbia received their instructions from one of Sky’s distribution companies, Vasilijević worked directly under Jeroen van der Werf, a Dutch man who went by the alias Sky111 and worked directly for Sky Global.

The two men appeared to be close, with Vasilijević referring to van der Werf as “brother” and confiding in him about his fears for his family amid Serbia’s escalating gang war.

He appeared to have friends among the Škaljari, the rivals to the Principi group. His messages show he was frightened by revelations of the Principi’s cruelty — and that he knew Sky resellers were among them. 

In March 2021, Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić held a televised press conference to announce an operation against the Principi, and displayed gruesome photographs extracted from their Sky phones of the violence they had meted out against the Škaljari. (This marked the beginning of the revelations about the “slaughterhouse” in the Belgrade suburbs.)

The next day, Vasilijević sent van der Werf a photo of one of the bodies that had been shown on television, writing, "1st one was my friend, bro.”

“[A]ll those scoundrels who killed my friends, cut off their heads and sent [photos to] each other to Sky, they have opened their device and many of resellers who worked together with them are under surveillance now,” he wrote in broken English.

“I have plenty proofs what they do for that piece of shits who killed at least 30 of my friends and some of the resellers been directly involved in one kill,” he said in another message.  

Van der Werf’s response is not logged in the investigative files, and it is unclear what he did with the information shared by Vasilijević. He did not respond to a request for comment.

But in an earlier incident described in French investigative files, van der Werf and the founder of Sky Global, Jean-Francois Eap, had become aware that Vasilijević had himself apparently violated company protocols by openly referring to drugs in a group chat. In a private conversation decrypted by investigators, Eap instructed van der Werf to “remind Sasa of the correct protocols”— but they then agreed to re-register him as a new agent.

Another Complaint Against Vasilijević — Filed By a Rival Gang