‘There Will Be Arrests for Years’: Hundreds of Drug Dealers Arrested in Underworld Sting

Hundreds of suspected gangsters and drug dealers are being arrested worldwide as police from 16 countries working with the FBI revealed a three-year operation to sell criminals compromised electronics gear that gave law enforcement the ability to monitor crime in real time.

The operation was headed by the FBI’s technical team, which cracked the encryption software, and it expanded over three years to include police from Australia, Netherlands, Sweden and more than a dozen other countries. Investigators focused on secretly distributing the compromised phones to criminal gangs in an estimated 90 countries. Europol officials said Tuesday that 800 arrests as well as the seizure of more than six tons of cocaine, five tons of cannabis and two tons of methamphetamine had been made in the past two weeks. Unannounced court filings for cases began appearing in US Federal Court dockets on the 17th of May, according to researchers.

Speaking at a press conference in The Hague, Netherlands, Jean-Philippe Lecouffe, deputy executive director of Europol, told reporters "this law enforcement operation is exceptional by its global outcomes… [we] carried out one of the largest, and most sophisticated law enforcement operations to date in the fight against encrypted criminal activities."

According to the officials, over an 18-month period law enforcement in 16 countries had access to 27 million messages, which often involved direct drug dealing activity because of the belief by the targets that the phones were secure. Officials have already made hundreds of arrests and searched 700 locations in Germany, Netherlands, Sweden, Australia and New Zealand. 

The operation was developed three years ago in a meeting between the AFP and FBI where it was revealed the FBI had hacked the secure messaging ANOM app and the two agencies decided to conduct an operation distributing handsets using the app that were compromised by the FBI hack to criminal organisations around the world.

The plan worked far beyond expectations as the devices were quickly adopted throughout organised crime circles, in part because of a market need: Last year police in Europe cracked two popular systems, EncroChat and Sky ECC, allowing investigators to sit on those communications for years before making hundreds of arrests and seizing 17 tons of cocaine overall.  

“There was a hole in the market for secure comms,” said a Belgian law enforcement source, who worked on the Sky ECC case and cannot be named. “With the help of the FBI’s technical capabilities, we have been happy to offer our secure services to criminals around the world.”

The Belgian official said that most of the arrests in the past 48 hours were for the most dangerous and violent criminals or those with the best ability to flee arrest but that the investigations and arrests have only begun.

“A lot of high level drug traffickers have been caught for months and are only finding out today,” said the official. “There will be arrests and cases made for years from this operation.”

Greek law enforcement officials noted that with criminal activity involving Serbia frequently captured in the exchanges, there is optimism that an investigation into at least four gangland style murders in Greece that police believe could have links to a Serbian drug war could find helpful information in the intercepts. 

“We have been made aware of the investigation and will work with Europol to determine if there is an overlap in these cases,” said a Greek Interior Ministry official, who declined to be named.

“We suspect there will be useful information,” they added.