Of course, but there would be similar market validation for being able to hold up a bank without ever being recognized or to be able to steal money from bank accounts anonymously.
That 'market' is called crime, and obviously criminals will be more than happy to fork over money for tools that help them to commit crimes without being arrested. In reality though, that market doesn't exist because if you or I would address that market we'd be hit hard by the authorities, and for good reason.
To be fair, I remember the story of the guy that designed the drug cartel's radio system[1]. And I share your dislike of facilitating bad actors.
That said, having met the "ad tech" industry[2] when doing a search engine I can say there are a large number of people who are perfectly happy to take the money from bad actors with a "perfectly legal" product and reasonable deniability.
But all of these schemes have a certain "addressable market" and an "expected return" which are hard to judge. Putting numbers to the "completely anonymous" phone scam was interesting.
[2] And to be clear, there are legitimate folks trying to do ad tech in legitimate ways, but there is also a lot of fraud in ad tech which involves setting up networks to take money from advertisers and feed it to bad actors.
There are more reasons then committing a crime for wanting anonymity. If I was someone with money like a celebrity I would want this phone. If I was a business with sensitive information I would want this phone. And so on.
Further down the article, when talking about the project history, it notes that the company that inspired An0m, Phantom Secure, ostensibly started selling heavily-locked-down BlackBerry phones for this audience.
They quickly found their primary market was, well... crime.
>If I was someone with money like a celebrity I would want this phone.
I think this part is underestimated by most people. Celebrities are frequently under a microscope and having to live your life while worrying about somebody overhearing it and taking it to the press must be frustrating. Everyone has bad moments in their lives, but at least for most of us these won't be dragged up and published to the world. A device like this could help alleviate that fear a little bit.
