European Union (EU) police agency, Europol, has arrested at least 746 criminals after decrypting a phone network of 60,000 organised criminals, including murderers, cartels, hitmen, assassins and money launders.
French police first hacked the network of EncroChat by deploying a “technical device” to penetrate so that they could read millions of messages “over the shoulders” of suspects as they communicated with custom-made devices.
“This is an unprecedented look into the heart of organised crime groups that led us to foil violent attacks, corruption, attempted murders and large-scale drug transports,” said Wil Van Gemert, deputy director of Europol, during a press conference in The Hague.
According to Van Den Berg, chief constable of the Dutch police’s central unit, some of the encrypted messages were so worrying that it went “far beyond the authorities’ imagination”.
In 2017, French authorities launched an investigation after finding that EncroChat phones were regularly found in operations of criminal groups and the company was operating from servers in France.
EncroChat sells customised Android handsets with GPS, camera and microphone functionalities removed. These devices are loaded with encrypted messaging apps as well as a secured secondary operating system, in addition to Android.
The phones also come with a self-destruct feature that wipes the devices after a PIN code is entered.
EncroChat had in June sent a message to its estimated 60,000 users to throw away their 1,000 euro devices as its servers had been “seized illegally by government entities”. The company has also been shut down.
EncroChat had customers in 140 countries globally. More than 90 per cent of EncroChat clients were linked to organised crime as between 50,000 to 60,000 of the phones were being used by hardened criminals.
The Dutch police have busted 19 crystal meth labs, seized 10 tonnes of cocaine and thousands of kilos of crystal meth, said Andy Kraagm, head of Dutch police’s central investigation division at the press conference.
After this massive operation, some users are throwing away their phones; some have gone offline completely while others are attempting to flee their countries.