Keep the story alive for DDoSecrets

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Here's a little story about why DDoSecrets is still important.

In 2008, a bomb strapped to a motorcycle exploded outside the office of a Croatian magazine, killing the journalist and publisher Ivo Pukanić in his car, as well as one of his staffers. After a trial, six people were convicted for the murders.

All of the accused were linked to organized crime in some way, and the man that prosecutors contended was the central figure in the scheme, Slobodan Ðurović, was convicted and is serving a sentence of 23 years. But the police and prosecutors could never prove who paid for the assassination.

Investigators found suspicious payments totaling more than a million euros made to the alleged killers, but were never been able to trace the source of the money. The money was paid from a shell company, concealing the possible intellectual author of the assassination. Investigators were stimied then by the corporate secrecy laws of the British Virgin Islands, where the shell company was registered.

But DDoSecrets believes that with enough time and data, the truth will always come out. There was evidence about this shell company in the files of the Cypriot financial services provider MeritServus, which DDoSecrets received from a source going by the name F R E A K Y in late 2022.

Like the British Virgin Islands, Cyprus is another offshore financial hub. MeritServus is just one of the financial services companies based in Cyprus that offer company formation and accounting services to people keen to conceal their business from their home jurisdictions.

In late 2022, F R E A K Y sent the Merit data to a few newsrooms at once, all large legacy brands with functioning SecureDrops. Some of these newsrooms didn't know what to make of the dataset that came in via their SecureDrop anonymous submission system. They sat on it.

Others, recognized the likely public importance of the dataset, and built projects around it. The Guardian launched the Oligarch Files vertical that winter, based off the documents. But The Guardian was focusing on big fish like Roman Abramovich, due to the war in Ukraine, overlooking some of the smaller stories in the leak.

DDoSecrets announced the dataset in our Limited Distribution section, and began to accept requests. Some of our requesters soon pointed out: isn't there a missing folder? This is common in data transfers, often a portion of a dataset is corrupted in transit. One of the folders was empty.

Although other newsrooms had this dataset, DDoSecrets were the first to contact the source to ask for a complete version, pointing out the missing folder. DDoSecrets were the only outlet to recieved the complete MeritServus leak.

Fast forward 11 months later, and the MeritServus dataset formed the backbone of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists' #CyprusConfidential project. Journalists with the OCCRP network discovered the evidence about the beneficial owner of the company linked to the assassination of the Croatian journalists. The owner of the shell company General Pioneer, that sent the large payment to the alleged contract killers, was found to be Bulgarian businessman Ognian Bozarov. Bozarov has not been charged with this crime.

The CyprusConfidential collaboration was built around a core of six datasets: two came from a source in contact with PaperTrail Media. The other four datasets came from DDoSecrets.

The cross-border investigation would have never happened without DDoSecrets' commitment to open data, refusal to compromise with exclusivity deals, and its stubborn pursuit of every last missing file and folder in any given dataset. While many networks can carry out cross-border investigations, at the core of their best stories, is a library of leaks. DDoSecrets feeds the news.

However, DDoSecrets does not have the financial resources that the large newsrooms or the large journalism networks have. We have had to pause the ability of journalists to request data from our limited distribution system, because we have run out of space on our servers. We need an influx of funding to continue.

We have set a goal of $150,000 for our end of year fundraiser. We will keep this fundraising page online until the end of January, and re-evaluate how to continue to publish.

If the DDoSecrets library has helped your research or enhanced your understanding of the world, we hope you will support us.