Police infiltrated Encrochat, an encrypted phone network used by organized crime, and read millions of messages for months, leading to international arrests
Police monitored a hundred million encrypted messages sent through Encrochat, a network used by career criminals to discuss drug deals, murders, and extortion plots.
VICEJoseph Cox
Context & Ripple Effects
The Encrochat infiltration is the moment Europe's police agencies stopped chasing individual intercepted messages and went after the platform itself, reading roughly a hundred million messages as career criminals discussed drug deals, murders, and extortion in real time. The payoff compounded for years: French and Dutch police later credited the same cracked EncroChat phones with 6,558 arrests.
It was not an isolated breach but a playbook. Dutch police had already decrypted over 258,000 IronChat messages back in a money laundering probe, and Belgian forces ran the same play against Sky ECC, pulling a billion messages in early 2021.
First-order effects
Organized crime groups that relied on Encrochat lost their private channel overnight — months of their own traffic on drug deals and murder plots became prosecutable evidence, driving international arrests.
Encrochat itself was finished as a product: its core promise of secure messaging was disproven for every subscriber at once.
Second-order effects
Criminal demand for encrypted handsets did not disappear — it migrated to rivals like Sky ECC, which became the next target and fell to Belgian police within two years.
Every successor network now inherits the assumption that its provider or servers may already be compromised, forcing criminal buyers to weigh trustworthiness of vendors they cannot verify.
Third-order effects
If the EncroChat-to-Sky-ECC sequence holds, law enforcement's structural shift is toward compromising communication infrastructure wholesale — capturing millions of conversations per operation rather than one wiretap at a time — which raises unresolved legal questions about mass interception evidence that outlast any single case.
The recurring breaches point to an arms race where each cracked network teaches both sides: police refine their server-side attack methods while the market for 'secure' criminal comms churns through short-lived providers.
The trend: European policing is moving from individual surveillance to full-platform compromise of encrypted criminal networks, with each takedown accelerating migration to a successor that gets cracked in turn.
National Crime Agency and police have smashed thousands of criminal conspiracies after the infiltration of encrypted communication platform #EncroChat in the UK's biggest ever law enforcement operation. Read more ➡️ https://www.nationalcrimeagency.gov.uk/ ... https://twitter.com/…
Here are just some of the images coming from various law enforcement agencies on what they seized/found. Pill mills, cash, weapons, cars, obviously drugs https://www.vice.com/... https://twitter.com/...
There's something quite funny about the police hacking into Encrochat and then only releasing messages which complimented the police https://nationalcrimeagency.gov.uk/ ... https://twitter.com/...
BBC has a good story about how authorities arrested 100s after breaking encryption on pricey, custom-made Android phones/software prized for their encrypted chat capabilities. Timely piece given ongoing legislative efforts to force encryption backdoors https://www.bbc.com/...
Amazing story from @josephfcox detailing how police broke into Encrochat, a global phone network that bills itself as “the electronic equivalent of a regular conversation between two people in an empty room.” https://www.vice.com/...
This is both brilliant and terrifying. When used for good, hacks/monitoring/infiltrating comms can be so powerful. But who defines, “good”. I still don't know where I sit on the morality of stuff like this https://twitter.com/...
Fantastic work by @NCA_UK and Police forces across the country. UK's biggest ever law enforcement operation resulting in 746 arrests. Congratulations to @NCA_LynneOwens and the whole team for this concerted operation to crack down on organised crime gangs. https://twitter.com/...
Beyond the huge impact to organized crime, there are also questions on the law enforcement operation itself. French authorities said this move was legal, and it may be. But it does appear to be a mass hack, at scale, of tens of thousands of Android devices https://www.vice.com/..…
NEW: documents obtained by @josephfcox detail one of the largest police hacking operations of all time. Police breached Encrochat, an encrypted phone network used by organized crime. They read messages discussing murder, extortion, massive drug deals https://www.vice.com/... http…
Fascinating story about European law enforcement hack of encrypted phone network Encrochat, which was popular with organised criminals. Million+ messages monitored, leading to arrests in UK, Norway, Sweden, France, Netherlands. https://www.vice.com/...