Political hackers use Bitcoin to manipulate elections in nine Latin American countries

Elections in Latin America have been manipulated for decades. In the 21st century, technology has infiltrated elections, making the region's elections dirty for the past five years. According to Bloomberg, Bitcoin is indispensable for manipulating elections using hacking technology.

Enrique Peña Nieto , who comes from a political family, is a local lawyer and a millionaire. In 2012 , he won the presidential election as a candidate of the Institutional Revolutionary Party. I wonder if he knew that Bitcoin helped him steal the victory of the election.

The PRI was in power for more than 70 years until its collapse in 2000. During Nieto's campaign, he promised to fight drug violence and corruption and to make Mexico's political system more transparent.

Meanwhile, thousands of miles away in his Chicó Navarra apartment in Bogotá, Colombian political hacker Andres Sepulveda was watching Nieto's election victory on his screen. While Nieto celebrated his victory publicly, Sepulveda had buried the campaign's dirtiest secrets.

He drilled holes in USB drives, hard drives and cell phones, burned circuits with microwaves and smashed them with hammers, Bloomberg reported. He shredded documents and threw them down the toilet, and emptied servers rented anonymously in Russia and Ukraine using Bitcoin. He called Peña Nieto's campaign the dirtiest he could remember in Latin America in recent years.

Sepulveda, 31 , said he did participate in Latin American political campaigns, and he told Bloomberg that Peña Nieto paid him $ 600,000 in budget funds, and this campaign was the most complex job he had done since 2005. Sepulveda grew up in a poor area north of Bogota and learned to write code at a local technical school. In 2014, Sepulveda was arrested and sentenced to 10 years in prison for allegedly carrying out cybercrime in Colombia's 2014 presidential election.

He led his hacker team to steal rival campaign documents, install spyware, and manipulate social media. During this period, he was hunted by drug cartels for attacking politicians' computers, and his hacker career was threatened, so he fled the country.

Sepulveda's team was even able to predict the next move of its competitors without them knowing it, all of which was done with spyware, which was used to monitor its competitors in real time.

He set up a program to automatically make campaign calls at 3 a.m. on behalf of his opponent's camp. In the end, the left-wing candidate, Enrique Alfaro Ramírez, lost to his opponent by a narrow margin.

To achieve his goals, Sepulveda played politics to his heart's content.

He fabricated public opinion on social media for or against both political parties. He said: "When I realized that people were more willing to believe online opinions than reality, I found that I had the ability to make people believe anything."

The Sepulveda incident shows that Bitcoin is not only used by dark web drug dealers, but also by amateur hackers and ransomware to carry out illegal activities.

“My job was to carry out those dirty war directives and wage psychological warfare, black propaganda, disinformation — the whole dark side of politics that everyone could see but didn’t know existed,” Sepulveda said.

He did this using Bitcoin, which was not revealed in the Panama Papers.