Starlink system terminals are actively sold on the black market – Kommersant

Countries that have not entered into a corresponding agreement with the American billionaire Elon Musk’s company SpaceX have access to broadband Internet from Starlink satellites, follows from the investigation. Bloomberg. According to the agency, Starlink terminals are actively sold on the black market.

Bloomberg claims to have uncovered numerous examples of illegal trading and activation of Starlink kits around the world. In particular, a Yemeni government official told the agency that the Internet of this system is widely used in the country. He argues that factions fighting in the civil war, including the Houthis, prefer to use Starlink for business and personal communications rather than the slow and censored state Internet. According to Bloomberg, Internet from Starlink satellites is also illegally available in Venezuela.

Western diplomats told Bloomberg that the Starlink Internet is used for logistics by the Sudanese paramilitary organization Rapid Reaction Force (RSF), which has been fighting Sudanese government forces since the spring of 2023. The agency’s interlocutors said that RSF members and Sudanese entrepreneurs are illegally importing Starlink terminals into the Darfur region in western Sudan. To do this, they use an underground network in which devices are registered in Dubai and then flown by helicopter to Uganda before being transported overland to Sudan.

According to Bloomberg, gold miners are actively using Starlink services in South Sudan and the Central African Republic. They gained access to the equipment even before the start of the Sudanese civil war through traders in the Sudanese city of Nyala. “Since the war in Darfur started, many people are bringing Starlink devices and using them for business. People pay between $2 and $3 an hour, so it’s a very good business,” one such merchant, Harun Mohamed, told the agency.

An unnamed trader told the agency that the Starlink system is also used in Kazakhstan. According to him, government measures to combat the circulation of illegal terminals in the country only led to an increase in prices for them on the black market. He claims that before the restrictions were introduced, the Starlink kit could be obtained through the local postal service.

Another country where Starlink Internet is available through illegal channels is South Africa, Bloomberg reports. It is alleged that in South African Facebook groups (owned by Meta, which is recognized as extremist and banned in the Russian Federation), one can find providers who offer to buy and activate kits in Mozambique, where they are licensed, and then deliver them across the border to local customers. The number of users of the system in South Africa has reached such proportions that the country’s authorities were forced to publish a statement on November 28, 2023, which emphasized the illegal status of using Starlink. Similar statements were published by the authorities of Zimbabwe and Ghana, the agency reports.

Following the outbreak of hostilities in Ukraine in 2022, SpaceX announced that it had provided Ukraine with thousands of Starlink terminals in the form of donations, as well as supplies paid for by the US military or Ukrainian volunteers. In February 2024, the publication Defense One, citing Ukrainian sources wrotethat Russian troops use Starlink communications services. According to them, it is used throughout the entire combat area. In early March, The Washington Post reportedthat US House Democrats have launched an investigation into SpaceX over Russia’s illegal use of Starlink terminals in the conflict in Ukraine.

Erdni Kagaltynov