£100,000 every day seized from gangsters after police crack Enigma Code of crime

POLICE have seized £100,000 a day from UK gangsters since cracking their ‘Enigma code’.

As well as netting £76,914,575 over two years, officers have made 2,864 arrests, a rate of nearly four suspects a day.

Encrochat – a secret phone network used by crime lords around the world – was cracked in 2020 by an elite team of French and Dutch agents.

The UK’s National Crime Agency compared the achievement to breaking Nazi Germany’s Enigma code and meant officers could snoop on the conversations of gangsters as they plotted executions, kidnappings, drug smuggling and money laundering.

So far 1,571 suspects have been charged and 383 have been convicted, many of whom had no choice but to plead guilty in the face of overwhelming evidence.

Among those arrested have been a number of corrupt police officers and individuals in other law enforcement agencies suspected of helping gangs to flood Britain’s streets with drugs and weapons. The NCA said yesterday that the infiltration of EncroChat had led to 9,296kg of class A drugs and 8,938kg of cannabis being recovered.

Officers have also recovered 170 firearms and 3,404 rounds of ammunition, including submachine guns and hand grenades.

It is estimated that around 10,000 criminals in the UK used the EncroChat instant messaging system. Developed in the Netherlands exclusively for the criminal market, it boasted being the most secure network in the world. It cost £1,500 for a six-month contract and was designed to frustrate police with a selfdestruct system and a ‘panic password’ to wipe data.

EncroChat had been considered unbreakable until June 13 last year when a warning was sent to users telling them its servers had been hacked by a government unit. It then emerged that police and law enforcement agencies around Europe had been secretly reading millions of instant messages practically ‘over the shoulders’ of suspects.

Court convictions include that of underworld armourer Umair Zaheer, 34, who called himself Assassin’s Creed after the violent video game because of his bloody trade selling assault weapons.

Nikki Holland, the NCA’s director of investigations, said of the breakthrough: ‘It was like having an inside person in every top organised crime group in the country. We have cracked the Enigma code.’