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Police said Thursday they had arrested more than 800 people across Europe after shutting down an encrypted phone system used by organized crime groups to plan murders and drug deals.
French and Dutch police said they hacked the EncroChat network so they could read millions of messages “over the shoulders” of the suspects while communicating with personalized devices.
Britain said it had arrested 746 people as a result of the operation in what it called a “massive breakthrough” against organized crime, while the Netherlands detained more than 100 people and there were arrests in Norway, Spain and Sweden.
EncroChat sent a message to its estimated 60,000 users in June warning them to discard their 1,000-euro devices since their servers had been “illegally seized by government entities.” Now it’s closed.
“It was as if we were sitting at the table where the criminals were chatting with each other,” said Jannine van den Berg, chief of police for the Dutch police central unit.
Some of the encrypted messages “were so troubling that they were far beyond our imagination,” van den Berg said at a press conference at the headquarters of the EU judicial agency Eurojust in The Hague.
‘Violent crimes’
Police used the trick to thwart crimes that include “violent attacks, corruption, assassination attempts and large-scale drug transport,” Eurojust and the EU police agency Europol said in a joint statement.
“Certain messages indicated plans to commit imminent violent crimes and prompted immediate action.”
French authorities launched the investigation in 2017 after discovering that EncroChat phones were “regularly” in operations against criminal groups and that the company operated from servers in France.
Then “they put a technical device to go beyond the encryption technique and have access to the correspondence of users,” the statement said.
Dutch police became involved based on information shared by French police.
According to judicial sources, between 90 and 100 percent of EncroChat’s clients were linked to organized crime, with between 50,000 and 60,000 of the phones in circulation.
The devices had most of the normal smartphone features removed and had preloaded apps for instant encrypted messages, plus a removal code that remotely erased them.
EncroChat sent what it called an “emergency” text to its users on June 13 saying it had been compromised.
“Today our domain was confiscated by government entities,” said the message. “It is recommended that you physically turn off and dispose of your device immediately.”
‘Millions of messages’
The joint Dutch-Frank investigative team unearthed a “colossal number of encrypted data,” Carole Etienne, the prosecutor for the French city of Lille, told AFP.
Law enforcement officials were able to “intercept, share and analyze millions of messages that were exchanged between criminals to plan serious crimes,” which were later shared with police, including in Britain, Sweden and Norway.
“We were able to see what is happening in real time with these criminals,” Andy Kraag, head of the Dutch police central investigative division, said at the press conference.
Dutch police arrested 19 methamphetamine laboratories, seized 10 tons of cocaine and thousands of kilos of methamphetamine, and arrested more than 100 people, Kraag said.
In Britain, the police arrested 746 suspects, recovered more than £ 54 million (€ 59.8 million, $ 67.5 million), as well as 77 weapons, including an AK-47 assault rifle and 1,800 rounds of ammunition.
“This is the UK’s broadest and deepest operation on serious organized crime,” said director of investigations for Britain’s National Crime Agency, Nikki Holland, in a statement.
Authorities insisted that the decision to hack the encrypted phone network was justified.
“The platform intended for this operation specifically addressed the needs of criminals,” said Wil van Gemert, Deputy Executive Director of Europol.
(REUTERS)
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