Latest news with #Bellingcat
CBC
10 hours ago
- CBC
Deadly opioid 40 times more powerful than fentanyl smuggled into Canada inside PlayStations, basketballs
Social Sharing The video call is grainy, but it's crystal clear what the person on the phone is trying to sell: illicit drugs, packaged and ready to be shipped to Canada. The seller, who goes by the name Kim, says he sells cocaine, methamphetamine, MDMA and nitazenes, a powerful class of synthetic opioids most people have never heard of — but which can be up to 43 times more powerful than fentanyl. "It can kill people, right? So, I just want to make sure that you know that," the CBC journalist asks in a secretly recorded phone call. "That is the game," the seller replies. The seller is one of the 14 people the CBC's visual investigation unit spoke to in text messages and phone calls after finding them through ads posted by users on major social media platforms such as LinkedIn, X and Reddit and e-commerce websites advertising nitazenes for sale. WATCH | How synthetic opioids get into Canada: Worse than fentanyl: How smugglers get a new, deadly drug into Canada 2 minutes ago Duration 5:37 A CBC News visual investigation tracks how deadly and super-potent synthetic opioids called nitazenes make their way into Canada, where they have killed hundreds of people. With open source support from investigators at Bellingcat, CBC finds hundreds of ads for nitazenes online, posted to social media and e-commerce sites, and talks to the sellers behind them to expose how these deadly drugs get smuggled to Canada. These ads, posted in the open, contain contact information that put CBC in touch with drug dealers who claim to be part of international criminal networks. CBC did not purchase any illegal substances. Nitazenes, which have never been approved for medical use and are Schedule 1 drugs under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, have increasingly been turning up in drug busts across Canada. Last year, two lab busts in Quebec alone may have accounted for more than a million counterfeit pharmaceutical oxycodone pills, which were actually protonitazepyne, a type of nitazene — or "analog" — according to the RCMP. Nitazenes have killed hundreds of Canadians over the past four years, according to data collected by CBC's visual investigations unit from coroners across the country. "[North Americans] not only are the largest consumers of nitazines, but really have the biggest problem as it relates to the number of deaths," said Alex Krotulski, director of the Center for Forensic Science Research & Education in Pennsylvania, a toxicology lab that tests for nitazenes in Canada and the U.S. "This is really becoming an established drug class of novel synthetic opioids." A more potent high Nitazenes aren't nearly as popular as fentanyl and its analogs, but they offer a more potent high, making them appealing to drug dealers. Drug users might not even know they're consuming nitazenes, which can be laced into counterfeit pills. "It makes me angry," said Montreal resident Christian Boivin after CBC shared its findings with him. Boivin's 15-year-old son Mathis died of a nitazene overdose last year after consuming what he thought were oxycodone pills. "[These sellers] don't have a conscience. They're bad people and they just want money… they don't care about lives." Mathis's story isn't an isolated case. Because public-facing statistics group them as "non-fentanyl opioids," CBC reached out to coroners in all 13 provinces and territories to compile data on the total number of deaths from nitazenes in Canada. The data received was incomplete — for example, Manitoba only provided statistics for 2024 — but indicates there have been nearly 400 deaths directly attributed to nitazenes or suspected to involve nitazenes since 2021. The true number of deaths is likely even higher. "I guarantee you because of the variability in toxicology testing, the variability in practices and variability in funding availability… [the number of deaths] is underreported," said Donna Papsun, a forensic toxicologist at Pennsylvania-based NMS Labs, which tests samples from across Canada. "If they're not looking for it, you can't find it." Going by the available data, the most deaths were in Alberta, with 121 since 2021, followed by Quebec with 91 and B.C. with 81. "We're worried that this will continue to rise as an ongoing threat," said Dan Anson, director general of intelligence and investigations for the Canada Border Services Agency. Sellers reveal how they smuggle drugs One of the ways that nitazenes make their way into Canada is through sellers who advertise on social media networks by posting images of powders overlaid with contact information. "Online ads are how this market functions right now," Anson told CBC. CBC's visual investigations unit, with support from open-source investigators at Bellingcat, found hundreds of ads in user-generated posts for more than a dozen types of nitazenes on social media platforms, including X, Reddit, LinkedIn, Behance (a graphic design website owned by Adobe), and e-commerce websites in India such as Exporters India, Dial4trade and TradeIndia. They surfaced by the dozens in Google image searches for keywords related to nitazene analogs. It often took mere minutes to receive a reply after responding to an online ad. Sellers were quick to share videos of their labs and products, even offering a step-by-step guide on how they would ship the drugs to Canada: first, by mislabelling the packages, then by concealing them inside PlayStation 5s, deflated basketballs, teapots and Chinese herbal packages. They would then be shipped via courier or the mail. Previous reporting on the topic in the U.K. even had the drugs hidden in dog food and catering supplies. One seller told a CBC reporter that shipments of nitazene could even be delivered the same day from Detroit, Mich., to Windsor, Ont. Platforms respond to CBC's questions on nitazene ads: "You'll see some pretty bizarre levels of creativity when it comes to importing illegal drugs," said Anson. "They're coming from online marketplaces ... and they're going to come through postal courier." When reached by CBC for comment, LinkedIn, Reddit and Adobe removed the posts containing ads that were flagged. X did not respond to a request for comment and the flagged posts were still live at the time of publishing. A Google spokesperson said it complies with valid legal removal requests from the public and authorities. Dial4Trade and Exporters India, two India-based e-commerce platforms where ads were found, told CBC they added restrictions to block nitazene ads. TradeIndia, another platform, said it removed the flagged ads. A global network It became clear that sellers of nitazenes are spread across the globe, and aren't always who or where they purport to be online. On the e-commerce site TradeIndia, next to the heading "Etonitazene Powder," was a picture of a brown powder offered by a Chinese biotech company. On its website, the company states "nothing is above the human health." It has an address listed in Shanghai that doesn't exist on Google Maps. But the company was quick to explain why the address didn't exist when asked in a secretly recorded phone call. "It's very dangerous to sell in China," a man who went by Jerry told a CBC reporter during a call with a Mandarin translator. Jerry said he and his partners needed a fake address to make the company seem real, but also so they couldn't be discovered by Chinese authorities. Videos inside overseas drug labs To show they were legitimate distributors, they shared videos from their lab — and said the name of the CBC reporter and the date to prove the video's authenticity — and showed us past shipments to Canada. They even offered to send samples of nitazenes for free to test for purity. But the sellers weren't just from China. CBC spoke to sellers who claimed to ship from the U.S., the U.K., India, even the Philippines. Over video, one seller who said they're from the U.K. showed shipment records that he said were for drugs going to Grande Prairie, Alta. Like any global trade, some nitazene sellers said they were struggling with the impact of U.S. tariffs. A person representing a company called Umesh Enterprises that claimed to be based out of India said nitazenes are "coming from India.... due to the issues going on between the U.S. and China with the tariffs," they said during a call. "There's been a lot of blockage from China so…. we go with India." The speaker, like many of the sellers, acknowledged that importing nitazenes to Canada is illegal and knew how lethal these synthetic opioids can be. "[These sellers] don't care how many people they take down or how many families they hurt," said Toronto resident Dale Sutherland, whose 22-year-old son Corey died from an overdose involving a nitazene in 2022. "It's very frustrating…. we have to have more regulations, more strict penalties." In response to CBC's findings, Canada's fentanyl czar, Kevin Brosseau, said in a statement the "emergence of nitazenes, and other highly potent synthetic opioids, is something I am concerned about and am taking very seriously." Brosseau pointed to the federal government's recently tabled Bill C-2, or Strong Borders Act, which will give Canada Post more authority to open mail and remove barriers to law enforcement inspecting mail during an investigation. Critics of the proposed act demanded the complete withdrawal of Bill C-2, warning it would expand government surveillance.
The Herald Scotland
22-05-2025
- Politics
- The Herald Scotland
Why Clarkson's cracks about Scotland make him a bloody idiot
The expression "word salad" is often linked to disordered discourse. Eliot Higgins, who runs the investigative journalism outfit Bellingcat, has been discussing it, and seems to be on to something. We talk about living in the post-truth age. Indeed, we've transited through the post-truth age to the post-reality age where disparate groups share no common ground. The death of any shared reality reveals itself in thoughts and ideas – discourse – which seem truly bizarre, or disordered. We hear comments today that frankly would have seen you jeered from the public stage a decade ago. The disorder is a two-way street afflicting both left and right. No group is immune as the very nature of being in a group today – a hard-delineated political subset fixed around identity – means estrangement from all other groups. Estrangement causes derangement, perhaps. The left is guilty, certainly, though it's on the ascendant right where you'll find discourse that's truly disordered. Read more by Neil Mackay Among the left, it's primarily on the swivel-eyed fringes where you'll hear people claim that songs like Walk Like An Egyptian by The Bangles are acts of cultural appropriation, or that The Tempest subjects audiences to colonial trauma (in fact, if you've studied the play, it's more accurately interpreted as Shakespeare's critique of colonialism). On the right, though, grotesque exaggeration, thin-skinned fragility and wild demonisation of opponents is now commonplace. Check any internet message board – even computer game forums, for pity's sake – if you're in doubt. Both sides behave deleteriously towards democracy, but the greater danger lies firmly to the right. Given we now live in a world that's more ridiculous than sublime, it's unsurprising to find Jeremy Clarkson emerging as the zeitgeisty exemplar of disordered discourse. Clarkson, a newspaper commentator, chose to describe the SNP's scrapping of peak rail fares as 'communism'. Clarkson regularly boasts about his terrible A-level results, so history and political science were clearly not his strengths. In theory, communism heralds a workers' utopia. I struggle to see how tweaking train prices ushers in an era of universal brotherly love and income equality. In practice, communism involves marching your opponents into the gulag and shooting them in the head for thought-crime. I'm pretty sure this hasn't happened in Scotland. Evidently, blokey old Jeremy will say it's just the bantz. He's only having a larf, isn't he? Well, yes and no. Firstly, Clarkson is a commentator not a comedian. He can say what he wants, but maybe stand-up suits his talents better than journalism. Secondly, even Clarkson sometimes makes sensible points about sensible issues. So what he's doing with his absurd exaggerations is blurring the line between what's real and should be taken seriously and what's nonsense. He's telling us it doesn't matter if you make stuff up as everything you read is just garbage. At the risk of becoming a po-faced liberal misery, I'm not sure that's wise. Clarkson plays his part in disintegrating intelligent debate. He also comes across as a bloody idiot, frankly. I'm pretty old-fashioned in believing that language should be used in a way which at least attempts to reflect reality. He could have called the rail issue a middle-class bribe, mocked the SNP for constantly changing tack, and said it was all the biggest load of cobblers since the Elves and the Shoemaker. But communism? Surely, he just makes himself and his argument ridiculous? Disordered. And by doing so encourages his readers to be ridiculous and disordered. The more we do this, the more commentary becomes meaningless, the more we carpet bomb ways of speaking to each other intelligently. During the debate about short-term holiday lets in Scotland, an Airbnb host described licensing plans as a "pogrom". A pogrom is defined as the mass murder of Jews. They debased their own argument; they debased the meaning of pogrom. It disintegrated shared reality. Boris Johnson just called Keir Starmer the EU's 'orange ball-chewing gimp'. Funny? Yes. In the pub, I'd spit my pint out laughing. But when an ex-Prime Minister says this he's telling us: don't care about truth, we need no shared way of debating. Britain is a "police state", Johnson says. Why? Because a woman was jailed for inciting racial hatred after tweeting 'set fire to the hotels' following the Southport murders which sparked mass rioting. Police state? Or justice you disagree with? We hear the same in Scotland. The 'Gestapo' and 'Stasi' would arrest you in your home thanks to anti-smacking laws. Just say you want to beat your kids. Don't invoke totalitarianism. The new Pope, who appears politically centrist, has been dubbed a 'woke Marxist' by leading MAGA commentators. Boris Johnson, who said Britain is a police state (Image: PA) But then MAGA owns the disordered discourse crown. Evidently, nothing comes close to telling the entire world Haitian immigrants were eating people's pets. The same disordered thinking appears in extremist claims that all trans women are rapists, all refugees are economic con-artists, and any criticism of Israel is antisemitic. It's silencing. British talk-show host Kevin Sullivan said after this week's new EU deal: 'I like standing in the non-EU passport lines! I'm proud not to join the Brussels-gang losers.' I guess he means he hated the deal, but rather than say that he claims to like wasting his life in queues. Evidently, much of this is attention-seeking. Much is also motivated by the playground mentality of "owning the libs". Thus you get people attacking the "be kind brigade". Since when was being kind bad? I guess if you're disordered it is. This all creates a society incapable of intelligent conversation. In Scotland today every issue is a crisis. Remember when a bottle return scheme was going to bring the nation to its knees, even though other nations had the same scheme? I'm not saying the legislation was right, I'm just saying we could rediscover an ordered way of expressing ourselves. If you cannot talk to your neighbour, you will hate them, and that way hell lies. Neil Mackay is The Herald's Writer at Large. He's a multi-award-winning investigative journalist, author of both fiction and non-fiction, and a filmmaker and broadcaster. He specialises in intelligence, security, crime, social affairs, cultural commentary, and foreign and domestic politics.
AFP
21-05-2025
- Politics
- AFP
Execution video from 2021 filmed in Ethiopia's Tigray region, not in Amhara
The 19-second clip posted on Facebook on May 15, 2025, is accompanied by text in Amharic that reads: 'Do not ask me why I must support Fano. Do not ask me why I hated the prosperity party and soldiers in military uniform.' The Prosperity Party governs Ethiopia. Image Screenshot of the misleading post, taken on May 19, 2025. The video, which has been shared more than 470 times, also contains a text overlay in Amharic which translates to: 'Amharas are being massacred. Please share this video with all.' The harrowing footage shows people wearing military uniforms rounding up and shooting an unarmed group in civilian clothes in a dry, hilly area. A similar post was also shared on Facebook. Amhara conflict After the Ethiopian federal government decided to disarm all local paramilitary groups in April 2023, the Fano militia – who were former allies during the Tigray war – turned against the state and a fresh conflict began in the Amhara region (archived here). AFP reported in March 2025 that the fighting has caused a humanitarian crisis: several million children are out of school and many hospitals are no longer functioning (archived here). In the same month, federal forces said they had killed nearly 300 Fano fighters, while reports indicated that the government had lost control of much of the rural areas in the region. Last year, Amnesty International reported that the Ethiopian army had carried out extrajudicial executions of civilians in Amhara (archived here). However, the footage circulating on Facebook is unrelated to current events in the region. Mahbere Dego massacre AFP Fact Check used the video verification tool InVID-WeVerify to conduct reverse image searches on keyframes from the video. The results established that a longer version of the clip, just over 90 seconds in length, was published on a gore site on June 17, 2021. Show Hide Content warning Show Image Screenshot of the longer version original video, taken on May 20, 2025 Hide The English caption reads: 'Ethiopia: Soldiers Executing Civilians (Longer version)', adding that 'it happened in Tigray, Ethiopia, where people say they are living a genocide'. A week later, Bellingcat, an independent organisation known for its digital investigative reporting on armed conflicts, published a report about this specific footage, which had been circulating on social media at the time, and concluded it was similar to other videos it verified of a massacre by Ethiopian soldiers in Mahbere Dego in the Tigray region sometime in January 2021 (archived here). Bellingcat's report included screenshots from the footage, which we matched to the video in the Facebook posts falsely claiming the events depicted were filmed recently in Amhara. Show Hide Content warning Show Image Screenshots from Bellingcat's report (left) and the false post, taken May 20, 2025 Hide CNN also aired part of the video a few days after Bellingcat published its findings. 'New video of Ethiopia massacre shows soldiers documenting executions,' the CNN caption reads (archived here). Months earlier, in April 2021, Belligcat ran an in-depth report on the Mahbere Dego massacre based on similar footage it believed was filmed in the same place and at the same time (archived here). BBC Africa Eye also published a similar investigative report about the massacre in the same month (archived here). The war in Tigray, pitting the Ethiopian military against the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF), cost more than 600,000 lives before a peace agreement was signed in Pretoria, South Africa, in November 2022 (archived here). Both sides were accused of atrocities (here and here) against civilians (archived here and here).
Yahoo
13-05-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
GTA pharmacist allegedly behind deepfake porn site now on leave, says hospital network CEO
A hospital pharmacist alleged to be a key figure behind a popular deepfake porn site is now on leave, according to the CEO of the Toronto-area hospital network that employs him. Last week, CBC News's visual investigations unit — in collaboration with open-source investigative outlet Bellingcat and Danish publications Politiken and Tjekdet — published an investigation that found David Do, a pharmacist in the Oak Valley Health network, played a prominent role in the operations of MrDeepFakes, which went offline this month, was the most popular site globally for deepfake porn. The site hosted tens of thousands of non-consensual and sometimes violent deepfake videos and images of celebrities, politicians, social media influencers and private citizens, including Canadians. Do's alleged role in the site was pieced together using data from the web, public records and forensic analysis of the site. In light of the allegations, Do is not working at Markham Stouffville Hospital and Uxbridge Hospital while an internal investigation is conducted, Oak Valley Health president and CEO Mark Fam told CBC Radio's Metro Morning Tuesday. "He's off right now," Fam said, without going into detail about the nature of Do's leave. "I want to be clear that as an organization, we unequivocally condemn the creation or distribution of any form of violent or non-consensual sexual imagery," Fam said. "We have to do our investigation to understand the allegations brought forward." Fam said hospital staff and patients have raised concerns since the allegations against Do were made public. "Our focus right now is taking care of our team," Fam said. Oak Valley's internal investigators are working closely with the Ontario College of Pharmacists as they look into the allegations, he added. The Ontario College of Pharmacists' code of ethics says no member should engage in "any form of harassment," including "displaying or circulating offensive images or materials." The college previously told CBC News the allegations "are extremely serious" and that it was "taking immediate steps to look into this matter further and determine the necessary actions we need to take to protect the public." WATCH | How a Toronto pharmacist secretly helped run a notorious porn site: Do has not responded to multiple requests for comment emailed by CBC News over a period of several weeks. When a reporter hand-delivered a letter to Do at Markham Stouffville Hospital, where he was working as an in-patient pharmacist on April 11, he said, "I don't know anything about that." On May 5, a CBC News reporter again approached Do in an attempt to interview him about his role in the website. Do told the reporter he didn't want to be recorded and that he was busy, before driving away in his vehicle. went offline on May 4, just before the findings of the joint investigation were published. Although sharing non-consensual deepfake porn is illegal in several countries, including Australia, South Korea and the U.K., it's not a crime in Canada. Prime Minister Mark Carney pledged to pass a law criminalizing it during his federal election campaign.
Yahoo
13-05-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
GTA pharmacist allegedly behind deepfake porn site now on leave, says hospital network CEO
A hospital pharmacist alleged to be a key figure behind a popular deepfake porn site is now on leave, according to the CEO of the Toronto-area hospital network that employs him. Last week, CBC News's visual investigations unit — in collaboration with open-source investigative outlet Bellingcat and Danish publications Politiken and Tjekdet — published an investigation that found David Do, a pharmacist in the Oak Valley Health network, played a prominent role in the operations of MrDeepFakes, which went offline this month, was the most popular site globally for deepfake porn. The site hosted tens of thousands of non-consensual and sometimes violent deepfake videos and images of celebrities, politicians, social media influencers and private citizens, including Canadians. Do's alleged role in the site was pieced together using data from the web, public records and forensic analysis of the site. In light of the allegations, Do is not working at Markham Stouffville Hospital and Uxbridge Hospital while an internal investigation is conducted, Oak Valley Health president and CEO Mark Fam told CBC Radio's Metro Morning Tuesday. "He's off right now," Fam said, without going into detail about the nature of Do's leave. "I want to be clear that as an organization, we unequivocally condemn the creation or distribution of any form of violent or non-consensual sexual imagery," Fam said. "We have to do our investigation to understand the allegations brought forward." Fam said hospital staff and patients have raised concerns since the allegations against Do were made public. "Our focus right now is taking care of our team," Fam said. Oak Valley's internal investigators are working closely with the Ontario College of Pharmacists as they look into the allegations, he added. The Ontario College of Pharmacists' code of ethics says no member should engage in "any form of harassment," including "displaying or circulating offensive images or materials." The college previously told CBC News the allegations "are extremely serious" and that it was "taking immediate steps to look into this matter further and determine the necessary actions we need to take to protect the public." WATCH | How a Toronto pharmacist secretly helped run a notorious porn site: Do has not responded to multiple requests for comment emailed by CBC News over a period of several weeks. When a reporter hand-delivered a letter to Do at Markham Stouffville Hospital, where he was working as an in-patient pharmacist on April 11, he said, "I don't know anything about that." On May 5, a CBC News reporter again approached Do in an attempt to interview him about his role in the website. Do told the reporter he didn't want to be recorded and that he was busy, before driving away in his vehicle. went offline on May 4, just before the findings of the joint investigation were published. Although sharing non-consensual deepfake porn is illegal in several countries, including Australia, South Korea and the U.K., it's not a crime in Canada. Prime Minister Mark Carney pledged to pass a law criminalizing it during his federal election campaign.
