A Bump in the Road for Europe’s Narco-Busters

June 12, 2020, was an unusually bad day to be a drug dealer. Across Europe, tens of thousands of criminals woke up to a concerning text message.

  IMPORTANT SECURITY MESSAGE
  > Today, we had our domain seized 
  illegally by government entities [...]
  > We can no longer guarantee the 
  security of your device [...]
  > You are advised to power off and 
  physically dispose [of] your device immediately.

Most complied, destroying their encrypted phones, each one custom-made to run the EncroChat secure messaging service. But they were too late — working together, authorities across Europe had been harvesting data for months, gaining unparalleled access to the heart of Europe’s criminal underbelly.

Over in Britain, investigators at the National Crime Agency — the U.K.’s notoriously underfunded counterpart to the FBI — were shocked by the revelations of the EncroChat operation. “They didn’t have a clue how big the issue was,” criminologist Mohammad Qasim tells Whale Hunting.

Europe’s narco-busters had to decipher a web of 115 million messages — drug transactions, of course, but also shirtless boat selfies and various other chit-chat you’d expect from hardened criminals. In one moment of gastronomic generosity, drug dealer Dean Cooper recommended his favorite new butcher shop to a friend on EncroChat: “Best meat [I] ever had mate”. His bank statements later revealed that he’d spent £34 there. In another message, he ill-advisedly told a pal that he’d spent £240 on trainers, which again matched the dealer’s bank statements.

The topless selfie that resulted in the arrest of Essex drug dealer Darren Stirling. (Credit: Essex Police.)

The EncroChat bust was hailed as one of the century’s greatest coups against organized crime. Nikki Holland, the NCA’s former director of investigations, compared the operation to cracking the Nazi Enigma code. But their victory lap around drug traffickers didn’t last long. (And Holland, incidentally, was unceremoniously fired last year for... sending secret information to an auto-deleting chat on an encrypted messaging app.)

More than 3,000 arrests were made in the U.K. alone, and 1,200 people have already been jailed — but looming legal issues may slow the pace of prosecutions considerably. Lawyers and defendants are now questioning the reliability of the data that underpins many convictions. And questions remain about whether the country’s own laws allow for convictions based on the type of hacking that investigators used to break into EncroChat.