Revealed: Top crooks’ terror as cops hacked secret phones
CRIME bosses, arms dealers and drug lords hit the panic buttons after elite police cracked their secret phone network, it can be revealed.
The terrified crime lords unwittingly used their devices to voice their fears of capture and outlined plans to flee Britain as law-enforcement officers began rounding them up.
The international sting led to the arrests of more than 746 underworld bosses in the UK last week after French authorities penetrated a military- grade encrypted messaging s ystem used by organised crime gangs.
The EncroChat phones, used by 60,000 subscribers around the world including 10,000 in the UK, cost about £1,000 each and another £3,000 a year to use the service. Messages on the network were secretly monitored by the National Crime Agency ( NCA), ‘ Britain’s FBI’, and other police forces from April after experts cracked the ‘Enigma Code’.
Among the texts, some of the most dangerous underworld figures were discovered warning associates that ‘the police are having a field day’ and ‘the NCA is not f****** about’.
One said: ‘These b******s had intel on everything’ and ‘ so many ppl been took [sic] down here, NCA been clearing up’. Another crook even messaged about his plot to move abroad: ‘I’m moving my family from UK this year because NCA is getting to [sic] smart.’
According to the NCA, no criminal targeted as part of the operation managed to escape arrest. One suspect was even picked up with his family trying to escape at Dover.
The sting, Britain’s biggest- ever operation against organised crime, also netted £54 million in cash, more than two tons of hard drugs and 77 firearms, including an AK- 47, machine guns, pistols and 1,800 rounds of ammunition and grenades.
The NCA also said 200 potential murder plots, including detailed plans to kidnap and torture rivals, were thwarted by the three-month long sting.
Matt Horne, gold commander of ‘Operation Venetic’, told The Mail on Sunday last night: ‘The rewards were very high.
‘These criminals had luxury vehicles, Rolexes, holiday homes abroad or money invested in property here.
‘ These were key players who shielded themselves from the handson crime but they still used these devices to command and control their networks.
‘Even as the criminals made these comments about being worried and the success of law enforcement, they carried on with their business and even carried on using their devices.’
The EncroChat device, made by a Dutch-based firm, emerged in 2016 and soon came on the radar of Dutch and French Police after they discovered the company’s servers in Lille, northern France, in 2017.
It is understood French authorities, using a controversial domestic snooping law, were able to fit a black-box device to the servers to successfully intercept messages earlier this year.
In June, EncroChat warned its users to throw away their devices, after discovering a bug in their systems preventing the phone’s message wipe feature from working correctly.
Criminals texted: ‘Police are having a field day’