Cristiano Ronaldo’s YouTube highlights were used by Russian spies to send coded messages back to Moscow through the comments section, with the Kremlin having their own account
Cristiano Ronaldo’s YouTube highlights comment section was uncovered to be a forum for Russian spies to send messages back to Moscow.
Yep. The Portuguese superstar’s YouTube highlights videos were found to be how a seemingly regular couple communicated with Moscow.
Andreas and Heidrun Anschlag appeared to be a normal couple; however, they were exposed as Russian spies in Germany.
From the town of Marburg, an hour north of Frankfurt, Andreas, who worked as a car engineer, and Heidrun, who looked after the house with their daughter, who had no idea about her parents’ true identities, lived a double life.
Holding Austrian passports, which were later found to be falsified, the couple presented themselves as citizens with South American heritage. According to German journalist Mika Beister, “There was nothing that would distinguish them from any other family in the town.”
However, for 23 years, the couple were paid £80,000 a year by Russia to spy on the West, beginning from before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
The Anschlags, whose real names are unknown, passed thousands of secrets to the Soviet Union and Russia, including from the EU, NATO and the UN, with the aid of a mole at the Dutch foreign ministry.
Having used radio and satellites to communicate with Moscow’s Foreign Intelligence Service, the SVR. The rise of the internet gave the couple a new platform to message their superiors in plain sight.
The Anschlags created a YouTube profile under the username @Aplenkuh1 – translated as ‘Alpine cow 1’ – in early 2011, with the Kremlin setting up an account for themselves called @cristianofootballer.
According to the BBC’s former Security Correspondent Gordon Corera in his book Russians Among Us, the comments section of videos of the then-Real Madrid superstar playing football became the chosen forum for communication.
Corera writes: “The YouTube platform created another novel way of communicating. The couple and the SVR created accounts a couple of months apart in early 2011 which commented on videos, mainly about the footballer Cristiano Ronaldo.
“They wrote, ‘It’s a very nice video and the song is also very good.’ This was answered by the SVR account called crsitanofootballer, saying, ‘He runs and plays like the devil.’
“This, German investigators believe, was a means of communicating by hiding in plain sight amid all the noise on the world’s largest video platform.
“The comments included a sequence of punctuation marks that could be turned into numbers which would then be referred back to a pre-agreed message.
“This was the next step on from the famous number stations, public radio broadcasts to spies and illegals in code, that have been used by the Russians as well as other countries for decades and can still be heard.”
The Anschlags were tracked by special intelligence forces and their German home was raided in October 2011. It’s said that Heidrun received encrypted messages through a transmitter in their study.
When the authorities stormed the property, she fell off her chair in shock and pulled the connection cable out.
The couple were sentenced in July 2013, with Andreas receiving six-and-a-half years in prison and Heidrun five-and-a-half years, while the Dutch minister official got 12 years.
But by the end of 2015, both spies had been released from jail and deported to Russia.