C. Scott Brown / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Pixel phones are apparently the phone of choice for criminals, drug dealers, and gang members in Spain’s Catalonia.
- Police say every time they spot someone with a Pixel, they think they must be a drug dealer.
- The popularity of Pixels among the wrong crowd has little to do with Google phones and everything to do with Android’s open nature.
Update, July 3, 2025 (11:45 AM ET): The crew behind GrapheneOS is understandably none too pleased about their good name being dragged through the mud, and members are speaking out about these reports from Spain. Over on X, the official GrapheneOS account posts:
European authoritarians and their enablers in the media are misrepresenting GrapheneOS and even Pixel phones as if they’re something for criminals. GrapheneOS is opposed to the mass surveillance police state these people want to impose on everyone.
Security is a tool, and can be wielded just as much for good as it can for bad. While some people may see this as an indictment, we’d say it’s more the inevitable consequence of GrapheneOS just being very, very good at what it does.
Original article, July 3, 2025 (12:28 AM ET): Police in Spain, specifically in the autonomous region of Catalonia, are very alert when they spot someone using a Google Pixel phone. As weird as it sounds, Pixels are highly preferred by those involved in organized crime, according to the Catalan police.
“Every time we see a Google Pixel, we suspect it might belong to a drug dealer,” said a police official leading the anti-drug operation in Catalonia, as per Xataka Android (machine translated).
But why are Pixels popular among criminals in that region? It really has little to do with how Google makes its phones and everything to do with the open nature of Android, which lets users use alternative operating systems.
Specifically, organized crime members in Catalonia use GrapheneOS, a privacy and security-focused operating system that keeps your data out of Google’s reach. Criminals and gang members in Spain prefer using GrapheneOS on Pixel phones, and there’s a good reason for it. GrapheneOS boasts particularly secure and well-executed full disk and metadata encryption, a security feature exploited by miscreants.
GrapheneOS officially supports most modern Pixel phones, and the project’s FAQ section strongly reflects its support for the series “due to better security and a long minimum support guarantee from launch for full security updates and other improvements.”
The page specifically mentions the Pixel 8 and Pixel 9 series, “for the incredibly powerful hardware memory tagging security feature as part of moving to new ARM V9 CPU cores.”
While many of us consider one of the Pixel’s standout features to be its cameras, criminals are reportedly physically removing these components to reduce the risk they’re exposed to, along with the GPS and microphone.
In Catalonia, a Pixel sighting now raises more than just tech curiosity, it raises red flags.
The police’s solution to counter these clever tricks is to infect suspects’ phones with malware to gain full access to apps, media, documents, and more.
So while Google surely didn’t intend for Pixels to become the phone of choice for criminals, their security hardware, mod-friendly nature, and support for GrapheneOS have made them unexpectedly attractive to the wrong crowd. In Catalonia, a Pixel sighting now raises more than just tech curiosity, it raises red flags.
Editor’s note: We have removed earlier statements that mischaracterized GrapheneOS’s device support.