Police infiltrated Encrochat, an encrypted phone network used by organized crime, and read millions of messages for months, leading to international arrests
Incredible investigation by @josephfcox into how the French police secretly took over a global phone network for organised crime. https://www.vice.com/... Vice Uk / @viceuk : Police monitored a hundred million encrypted messages sent through Encrochat, a network used by career criminals to discuss drug deals, murders and extortion plots. https://www.vice.com/... Joseph Cox / @josephfcox : 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/... James Cook / @jamesliamcook : 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/... @briankrebs : 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/... Edward Ongweso Jr / @bigblackjacobin : 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/... Higgs / @iamthehiggster : 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/... James Brokenshire / @jbrokenshire : 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/... Joseph Cox / @josephfcox : 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/... https://twitter.com/... Jason Koebler / @jason_koebler : 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/... https://twitter.com/... Ryan Gallagher / @rj_gallagher : 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/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This was not the first time a supposedly secure messaging network turned out to be readable by police: Dutch investigators had already decrypted more than 258,000 IronChat messages back in 2018 during a money laundering probe. The Encrochat operation scaled that capability from a single investigation to infrastructure — French police secretly ran the network itself for months and swept up roughly one hundred million messages about drug deals, murders and extortion.
What made the story durable is that it became a template rather than a one-off: Belgian police replicated the play against Sky ECC within a year, and retrospective reporting on how European agencies cracked both networks confirmed the approach had become standard practice.
First-order effects
- Career criminals who bought Encrochat handsets for operational security were suddenly prosecutable en masse, with international arrests following in the UK, Norway, Sweden, France and the Netherlands — including 746 in the UK alone at the time of disclosure.
- Police forces gained months of real-time visibility into planned crimes, letting them act on deals and plots as they were being discussed rather than reconstructing them after the fact.
Second-order effects
- Criminal demand did not disappear, it migrated — users fled to successor networks like Sky ECC, which Belgian police then infiltrated in early 2021, capturing around a billion messages and turning each provider takedown into intelligence for the next operation.
- Encrypted phone vendors lost their core selling point: if the operator itself can be taken over covertly, the handset's encryption guarantees mean little, collapsing trust across the whole secure-device market.
Third-order effects
- Law enforcement strategy shifted from intercepting individual devices to compromising entire communications platforms — a structural change that makes any centralized encrypted network serving criminal markets a standing target, and pushes both police and their targets toward an arms race over who controls the infrastructure.
- As the tally from the original operation climbed to 6,558 arrests by 2023, it also set up a longer legal reckoning over how bulk-secret surveillance evidence can legitimately be used in courts across jurisdictions.
The trend: European police have moved from cracking individual phones to covertly operating entire encrypted networks used by organized crime, with each compromised provider feeding intelligence into the next.