PARIS — The police in Europe said Thursday they had arrested hundreds of people on suspicion of drug trafficking and other crimes after successfully hacking into an encrypted phone network being used by organized criminals around the world.
The authorities said that by hacking into the network, the police were able to monitor criminal activity and communication as it was happening, allowing them to stop drug deals and even to prevent murder.
Officials said in a statement that “millions” of messages were read in “real time, over the shoulder of the unsuspecting senders,” leading to arrests in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and elsewhere in Europe.
“It was as though we were sitting at the table where the criminals were chatting among themselves, really,” said Jannine van den Berg, chief constable of the central police unit in the Netherlands, at a news conference in The Hague. “What makes this investigation unique is that at a large scale we managed to read all of these criminal messages live,” she said.
The phone network that was used, known as EncroChat, provided specially altered phones — no camera, microphone, or GPS — for about $1,100. The phones allowed users to immediately erase compromising messages. The network also provided subscriptions with global coverage for about $1,600 over six months, even offering round-the-clock tech support.
EncroChat, since shut down, “promised anonymity and complete secrecy to its users,” said Carole Etienne, a French prosecutor. The phones, she added, were “widely used throughout the world” by criminal organizations.
“What seems to be possible only in thrillers and police shows, we actually have seen happen,” said Andy Kraag, head of the central investigations division in the Netherlands, which led the operation in collaboration with French authorities.
“These messages that we captured give us a very detailed view of daily life in the criminal world,” Mr. Kraag said at the news conference. “We understand better who these people are and how they work.”
Officials Thursday spoke in superlatives about the operation.
The authorities had been monitoring the network for over two months before it was shut down, said Tina Hollevoet, a Europol spokeswoman. The data is still being analyzed and is expected to lead to “hundreds” of new investigations in the coming months.
“What is really important for Europol is that we are kind of just getting started,” Ms. Hollevoet said. “In this initial phase the focus has been really on acting on those messages which contain live, threatening content, and the crimes that were really endangering people’s lives. But we still have so much data that is being analyzed, processed and transmitted to different countries.”
The hacked messages and conversations were shared among the police in Europe through Europol. In Britain, the police made nearly 750 arrests, and seized $67 million in cash, 77 firearms and over two tons of drugs.
The information was also used by the police in Sweden and Norway, leading to arrests in those countries as well.
In the Netherlands, the police were able to make some 60 arrests as a result of the intercepted messages and to seize 22,000 pounds of cocaine, 154 pounds of heroin and 3,300 pounds of crystal methamphetamine, among other substances. They also dismantled 19 synthetic drug labs, seized 25 vehicles with “special compartments” and also “expensive watches,” according to a statement from Europol.
The hacking “allowed authorities to detect and stop potential criminal activities,” said Ms. Etienne, the French prosecutor. “More than 100 criminal acts were picked up by Europol.”
The investigation into EncroChat began in 2017, and it was initially focused on Lille, a city in the north of France, where the authorities discovered the presence of EncroChat servers. On June 13, the network sent out a warning to its users that it had been “infiltrated” by “governmental entities,” and advised customers to immediately get rid of their phones.
“In many of our investigations, but also in other European countries, we were coming across a lot of criminals with EncroChat phones, and after a while that caught our attention,” said Maj. Gen. Jean-Philippe Lecouffe, of the French gendarmerie. “We realized that this network was used over 90 percent of the time by criminals to message each other and hide their communications from traditional police wiretapping techniques.”
Ms. Hollevoet, the Europol spokeswoman, said the operation has provided deep insight into how organized crime functions, and described the level of detail that law enforcement was able to monitor over EncroChat as “unprecedented.”
Aurelien Breeden contributed.
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