Dealers’ secret messages were cracked by police
Crooks used app messaging system to reveal own crimes
TWO drug dealers who were part of an operation turning over more than £4 million every three months have been jailed after officers cracked their encrypted chats.
Officers said Stephen Dalton, 54, from Erdington, and Adam Lynn, 32, from Kingstanding, believed they could evade detection using EncroChat.
It is a phone messaging service favoured by criminals used for private app chats.
The pair discussed large shipments of drugs, as much as 110kg of cocaine in just three months.
They were supplying the haul across the West Midlands and beyond, police said.
West Midlands Police said that they wrongly believed they were operating under the radar of police and chatted about their deals using encro names. Lynn was called ‘Mushroomborn’ and Dalton used the handle ‘Hardbeer’.
But law enforcement agencies in Europe developed a way to collect to data from EncroChat.
So their days of believing they were “untouchable were numbered”, police said.
The wealth of encrypted data, including Dalton and Lynn’s chats, was processed by the UK National Crime Agency (NCA) and a huge operation undertaken by the West Midlands Regional Organised Crime Unit (ROCU).
A spokesman said: “In their conversations we found the pair talking about the price of the cocaine – estimating the price per kilogram at £38,000 – and their potential profits, plus drug purity, money owed. Also even how the Covid pandemic would impact their operation.”
Officers stopped Lynn in West Bromwich in October 2020.
He tried to run but after a short chase he was arrested, police said. As he was being put in a police vehicle he tried to destroy a SIM card from the mobile phone he had on him. Officers went on to search an address in Bell Street, Wolverhampton, where cocaine was discovered as well as a room which had been converted for the production of cannabis.
Later that evening Dalton was arrested from the driveway of his home. Dalton and Lynn both pleaded guilty to conspiracy to supply cocaine between March 1, 2020 and June 12, 2020.
Dalton, of Short Heath Road, Erdington, was jailed for 12 years and eight months and Lynn, of Kingstanding
Road, Kingstanding, was sentenced to 10 years and eight months at Birmingham Crown Court.
Speaking after the case, Detective Chief Inspector Leanne Lowe from ROCU, said: “There were many strands to the evidence we compiled in this complex investigation.
“We used their conversations and images they sent each other, as well as mobile phone data to establish how they were connected and what they were doing. And it resulted in an extremely extensive supply chain of cocaine being disrupted.”