Benjamin, 44, has a place by the park in an up-and-coming area of downtown Dallas, Texas. He seems to keep to himself and eschews social media. Dulce, 42, lives nearby in a gated community lined with streets of terraced houses and grassy lawns in adjoining Fort Worth.
They look like small business owners making modest incomes working online. But the two bring in huge sums of cash by selling access to TheTruthSpy, a collection of Android so-called “stalkerware” surveillance apps, including Copy9 and MxSpy, which have compromised hundreds of thousands of people’s phones around the world.
Benjamin and Dulce are among a wider network of Americans selling the phone spyware, whose involvement helps to conceal the company behind their development, a Vietnam-based startup called 1Byte.
Other than selling the same apps and living close to each other — some...
