ENCROCHAT: WHATSAPP FOR CRIMINALS.













A photo of an EncroChat phone.


EncroChat the at present defunct Europe (France) based telecommunications network and service provider, that provided end to end encrypted telecommunication that was tailor made for criminals and their activities. The service was used by a who’s who of individual criminals and organizations, such as the infamous Sinaloa Cartel. Anyone familiar with the content on this blog, know that I focus heavily on crime and criminals, in upcoming post’s I will focus exhaustively on Dutch criminals and some of their sophisticated operations. Another reason for highlighting Dutch criminals, is the oft repeated mantra by Dutch politicians that the former Netherlands Antilles, where I live are corrupt and filled with criminals. This is my way of balancing the scales and crafting a more nuanced and realistic narrative, than the one the Dutch media is crafting pertinent to my home.

European police infiltrated EncroChat in a Europe wide investigation, in March and June 2020. As of the 7th of July 2020, at least 800 arrests have been made across Europe. On Friday July 3rd, 2020, News.sky.com carried an article on the EncroChat takedown by Europol and other European based policing agencies, the following is a quote from said article: ‘Police forces across Europe celebrated their infiltration of EncroChat on Thursday, disrupting international organised crime networks which were using the company's encrypted phones’. Leaked documents obtained by Motherboard (Vice.com), show that EncroChat’s phones were modified Android devices. Click the link below for the Vice article for more information.
https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/3aza95/how-police-secretly-took-over-a-global-phone-network-for-organised-crime

Europol said the devices were marketed as guaranteeing perfect anonymity and came with dual operating systems - a normal one and a hidden one to conduct secret messaging on. Physical modifications to the devices also meant the camera, microphone, GPS transponder and USB port were removed. Additionally, users could enter a PIN code which would immediately delete all of the messages on the device - as would happen in the event that wrong passwords were repeatedly entered. These functions ‘apparently were specially developed to make it possible to quickly erase compromising messages, for example at the time of arrest by the police’, according to Europol. ‘In addition, the device could be erased from a distance by the reseller/helpdesk,’ the agency added.
Vice.com’s US edition posted an article that said a bulletin written by the FBI, foe law enforcement agencies revealed that: ‘The FBI's “emerging intelligence report” is dated February 2020 and was exposed in the 270GB BlueLeaks data dump. It notes that traffickers from the Sinaloa transnational crime organization (TCO) were using EncroChat cryptophones as recently as October of last year, according to an unclassified case citation that was marked DEA sensitive and also law-enforcement sensitive by the FBI’.
According to Vice: ‘Sim cards used in these phones were made by Dutch telecom firm KPN, according to earlier Motherboard reporting. Encrochat also stripped these handsets of their camera, microphone, GPS, and USB terminals, and installed proprietary encrypted messaging programs on them, which routed texts through their own servers, “located offshore” in their datacenter, according to an archived EncroPhone webpage’.

Het Parool, a well-known Dutch media outlet, connected the EncroChat busts to the dismantling of 19 labs in the Netherlands, that produced MDMA in the Southern border regions that straddles the Netherlands and Belgium. Persons arrested worked with Mexicans based in the Netherlands to produce: ‘the much more lucrative crystal meth’.
Dutch newspaper NRC, wrote the following in an article: ‘the fact that Dutch pill makers have made a union with Mexican cartels for the production of crystal meth would not have become so clear without the hack at Encro’. The link below is the article referenced (note the article is in Dutch), using translate to read it if you do not speak Dutch.
In upcoming post’s, I will highlight the deep involvement of Dutch criminal organizations, with Mexican (TCO’s).














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