POLICE ‘LEFT STUNNED AT SCALE OF UNDERWORLD GUN TRADE’
‘EYE-OPENER’ FOR CODE-BREAK COPS
THE dismantling of the secret ‘EncroChat’ communications network used by big-time criminals has left Manchester detectives shocked at the sheer scale of the illicit trade in guns, the M.E.N. has learned.
Details of the UK’s biggest police operation, led by the National Crime Agency (NCA) were revealed last week, including 746 arrests, and seizures of £54m in cash, 77 guns and two tonnes of drugs.
In Greater Manchester alone £1.7m in cash was seized alongside 15kg of cocaine, two kilos of heroin, two kilos cannabis, 70kg of amphetamines and 500,000 ecstasy tablets. Some six firearms, including machine guns, 200 rounds of ammunition and 10 encrypted phones were also found in raids around the city.
So far 34 people from Greater Manchester have been charged but Operation Venetic is far from over – detectives are still making their way through vast swathes of information uncovered when the NCA finally cracked the EncroChat servers in France.
The seizures and the contents of the secret messages that police have been able to decrypt have surprised even experienced police officers, who believe the illicit trade in guns in particular is far more widespread than they had thought.
“It’s been an eye-opener. It’s obvious that although it’s still a rare thing for guns to be fired, they are obviously used to frighten people and they are being traded more often than we thought,” said one experienced cop. Other senior officers have endorsed that opinion.
It’s thought there were about 10,000 EncroChat users in the UK and 60,000 worldwide.
The devices which use EncroChat like the Aquaris X, costing between £1,300 and £1,500 for six months of use, were marketed as providing totally secure communication which could not be cracked.
Aquaris X devices with EncroChat software were used in the murder of gangland enforcer John Kinsella – a good friend of murdered Salford ‘Mr Big’ Paul Massey. Kinsella was shot dead on a roundabout of the M62 near the village of Rainhill in May 2018. His killers had communicated using these devices.
Police couldn’t access the phones’ contents – and detectives have confirmed the cracking of the EncroChat servers doesn’t change that. The data they have covers another period of time.
Kinsella had been a pallbearer at the funeral of Massey, who was shot dead himself outside his home in Clifton, Salford, in 2015. Both men suffered similar fates, assassinated with the help of encrypted devices. But the devices used in Massey’s murder were different – BlackBerry phones with PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) encryption software.
Initially used by human rights activists, PGP devices were quickly adopted by criminals keen on thwarting the law. The software had a ‘remote wipe’ function, also known as a ‘kill pill’ where the content could be swiftly deleted. But police in Holland and Canada managed to hack the server in 2016. They brought down one encryption network only for it to be replaced by EncroChat, a Dutch firm.
Devices with EncroChat are able to boot in two modes. When only the power button is pressed to turn the handset on, they boot into a dummy Android home screen. But when the handset is switched on by pressing the power button together with the volume button, the phone boots to a secret, encrypted partition which facilitated secret communication via EncroChat’s French servers.
Last week’s NCA operation is regarded as a ‘game-changer’ by police. As one of the messages police found said: “The police are winning this year.”
The M.E.N. has contacted EncroChat for a comment.