European police detained three people in Belgrade, whom they call the “largest” drug lords of the Balkans. This became possible thanks to the hacking of the encrypted messenger Sky ECC, which was used by criminals to conceal their activities from the law.
On May 11, the law enforcement agencies of Serbia and the Netherlands held coordinated raids on the alleged leaders of the cartel and its drug distribution infrastructure, reports Europol. During the operation, 13 suspects were arrested in Serbia, including three leaders, 35 houses and almost 3 million euros, 15 expensive cars, many jewelry, watches and weapons were seized.
The police also arrested another 10 members of the cartel in Belgium, Serbia, Peru and the Netherlands, only 23 people. All these detentions were carried out precisely thanks to the previous hack Sky ECC.
Sky ECC is a paid application for exchange with through encryption developed by Sky Global. The same company was engaged in the manufacture and sale of Google, Apple, Nokia and Blackberry without GPS modules, cameras and microphones. Thus, through Sky ECC and special smartphones, criminals could communicate with text with “colleagues in the workshop” without fear of being listened to the police or other third parties.
In March 2021, Sky Global ceased to work after aircraft in Belgium and the Netherlands for users and sellers of Sky ECC. In the same month, American prosecutors charged the general director of Sky Global for the sale of encrypted devices for drug dealers in order to help them evade justice.
Soon after these arrests, the Belgian police said that she managed to “hack” the encryption of the Sky ECC, which allowed her to “monitor the information flow” of about 70 thousand users of the application. All this information concentrated in the hands of the federals still continues to contribute to investigations, arrests and trials.
In connection with the latest arrests, the European police also recalled two other encrypted communication services – EncroChat and Anom, which were previously also hacked and soon closed. Like Sky ECC, these paid communication applications were popular among criminals to conceal their illegal operations from the law. Data of all three services was used by law enforcement officers as evidence for thousands of arrests.
The recent decline of three encrypted communication tools used by criminals – ENCROChat, Anom and Sky ECC – showed the prevalence of Balkan criminals in global trade in cocaine and organized criminal actions, ”said Europol.
Although the use of data received in this way as evidence for the arrest of people led to several legal claims by the accused, the courts in such situations always stand on the police side.