It was a joint action by sixteen countries and Europol. By cracking encrypted messages, the police tracked down the suspects and their activities. The target of the international action was the drug trade.
Several German media reported on the action on Monday. The Southgerman newspaper calls it ‘a major blow to the drug trade’. In Germany alone, more than a hundred homes were searched, mainly in the federal state of Hesse. The police found raw materials for drugs. Swedish Interior Minister Mikael Damberg called it “a hard blow to Swedish gang criminals.” A Swedish top criminal would have been arrested, Swedish newspaper Express writes.
Cryptotelefoons
The various national police units did not reveal much about the action on Monday. They refer to the press conference that Europol gives Tuesday morning in The Hague. A spokesperson for the Dutch police confirms that crypto telephones played a role in the action. “And we’ve done great things with the FBI.” according to The mirror The FBI has succeeded in hacking encrypted chats on so-called crypto telephones. For example, the detectives could read in encrypted chats, which brought the suspects into the picture.
The Telegraph reported Monday evening that agents have sold cryptophones to criminals. The criminals thought the phones were encrypted, but that turned out not to be the case. How the police acted will be revealed at the press conference. The Telegraph writes that special investigative teams brought the new cryptophones to market and said they were “unbreakable.” The police actually controlled the phones and the server. Officers listened and read unimpeded for months. In addition, they could follow the location of the suspects live and remotely switch off the voice changer.
In March this year, the Dutch police cracked cryptotelephone provider Sky and thus got the ‘whole underworld on a silver platter’, according to a spokesperson at the time. Sky was the successor to EncroChat, a crypto provider that was hacked a year earlier.
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