Since unlocking the ‘Enigma code,’ police have taken £100,000 each day from UK thugs.
Officers have made 2,864 arrests, or over four suspects every day, over the course of two years, collecting £76,914,575.
An elite team of French and Dutch operatives cracked Encrochat, a secret phone network used by criminal lords all over the world, in 2020.
Officers could listen in on gangsters’ chats as they plotted executions, kidnappings, drug smuggling, and money laundering, according to the UK’s National Crime Agency, which compared the achievement to breaking Nazi Germany’s Enigma code.
So far, 1,571 individuals have been charged and 383 have been found guilty, with many of them having no choice but to plead guilty despite overwhelming evidence.
A number of corrupt police officers and members of other law enforcement organizations have been arrested on suspicion of assisting gangs in flooding Britain’s streets with drugs and weapons. The NCA announced yesterday that EncroChat’s infiltration resulted in the recovery of 9,296kg of class A narcotics and 8,938kg of cannabis.
170 firearms and 3,404 rounds of ammunition, including submachine guns and hand grenades, were also discovered by officers.
Around 10,000 criminals in the UK are thought to have utilized the EncroChat instant chat system. It claimed to be the world’s most secure network, having been developed specifically for the criminal market in the Netherlands. It was designed to confound cops with a self-destruct system and a ‘panic password’ to destroy data and cost £1,500 for a six-month contract.
EncroChat was thought to be indestructible until a warning was sent to users on June 13 last year, informing them that its servers had been hacked by a government agency. Then it was revealed that police and law enforcement agencies all over Europe were secretly reading millions of instant messages ‘over the shoulders’ of suspects.
Umair Zaheer, a 34-year-old underground armourer who dubbed himself Assassin’s Creed after the brutal video game because of his murderous business selling assault weapons, was convicted in court.
‘It was like having an inside person in every top organized criminal gang in the UK,’ said Nikki Holland, the NCA’s director of investigations, of the breakthrough. The Enigma encryption has been broken.’