Europol on Tuesday announced that the takedown of EncroChat in July 2020 led to 6,558 arrests worldwide and the seizure of €900 million in illicit criminal proceeds.
The law enforcement agency said that a subsequent joint investigation initiated by French and Dutch authorities intercepted and analyzed over 115 million conversations that took place over the encrypted messaging platform between no less than 60,000 users.
Now almost three years later, the information obtained from digital correspondence has resulted in –
A majority of EncroChat users are said to be members of organized crime rings (34.8) and drug trafficking groups (33.29%). The remainder engaged in money laundering (14%), murders (11.5%), and firearms trafficking (6.4%).
The Android devices were marketed as offering “perfect anonymity” to users, allowing them to operate with impunity through features like automatic deletion of messages and options to automatically erase them from a distance by the reseller.
Unbeknownst to the users, the platform was infiltrated by French and Dutch law enforcement in early 2020, offering valuable insight into the groups and their modus operandi. The company’s servers, which were operating from France, were taken down.
The illegal use of encrypted communications has since led to the dismantling of another service called Sky ECC in March 2021. In June 2021, U.S. and Australian officials disclosed that they ran an encrypted chat service called ANoM (aka AN0M) for nearly three years to intercept 27 million messages exchanged between criminal gang members globally.
Source: https://thehackernews.com/
