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Right in the midst of the Covid pandemic in spring 2020, DCI Driss Hayoukane, a senior investigating officer at the Metropolitan Police, was let in on an extraordinary secret.
Called to a highly confidential meeting by his boss, Hayoukane learned that French police had figured out how to eavesdrop on a telephone network used by the world’s most dangerous organised crime groups.
Having spent 30 years investigating organised criminals, Hayoukane had planned to spend his retirement following another passion – training and coaching young people in football. But what he heard at the meeting changed all that.
With his retirement plans now on hold, the DCI was asked to assemble a team at short notice to prepare to analyze whatever the French could provide.
Working from a huge secure building somewhere in London, “with all the technical wizardry” the police and other investigative agencies could muster, the Met’s team found itself with direct access to the communications of London’s criminal gangs.
“We could not cope with the amount of data we were getting. We were overwhelmed,” Hayoukane told the BBC in a podcast series released this week.
For over two months from April 2020, Met officers were able to eavesdrop on messages sent by 1,400 suspected criminals who were unaware that their supposedly secure EncroChat encrypted phones had been compromised by a French hacking operation.
It was, according to the six-part BBC Radio 5 Live podcast, Gangster presents: Catching the Kingpins, the biggest organised crime bust in British policing history, leading the Met Police to arrest 950 suspected criminals and secure convictions against 750 of the most dangerous criminals.
The Met’s operation against EncroChat, codenamed Operation Eternal, uncovered corrupt police officers in the pay of organised crime, murder conspiracies, an illicit trade in fire arms and drugs, and for the first time gave the Met police a detailed picture of the links between rival crime groups.
Hayoukane first began noticing that many suspected drug traffickers were using EncroChat phones in 2017. EncroChat handsets – which are essentially modified Android phones with sophisticated encryption built in – were designed, he said, for “criminal use”.
The phones were expensive, typically costing £1,500 for the handset and £1,500 every six months for a subscription. They were sold through a network of resellers, who would meet buyers in person, under the counter in some phone shops, or over the web for bitcoin. Each phone came with a “duress PIN”, which once entered would irretrievably wipe the contents of the phone.
The mystery behind EncroChat
The people behind EncroChat is still a matter of speculation. EncroChat was registered in Panama in 2014 and another company of the same name in Hong Kong in 2013.
What is known is that the phones were sold initially from Canada by a company that specialised in selling phones to legitimate users who were interested in protecting their privacy.