LONDON—Two British men have been jailed for conspiracy to murder and a number of other crimes after a prosecution that was made possible only when French police hacked into the EncroChat network.
Paul Fontaine, 36, from Hackney, east London, and Frankie Sinclair, 34, from Cardiff, Wales, were jailed for life, with a minimum term of 18 years, on Friday for conspiracy to murder after a trial at the Old Bailey in London.
Judge John Hillen said they were both part of a “nationwide criminal network” which used EncroChat.
Convictions Could Be Quashed
Britain’s Investigatory Powers Tribunal is set to deliver a final ruling later this year in response to various challenges over the legality of the hack, which could mean dozens of EncroChat convictions, like that of Sinclair and Fontaine, could be quashed.A Belgium-based NGO, Fair Trials, has called for a moratorium on EncroChat prosecutions and wants a European parliamentary inquiry into the use of Pegasus, the Israeli-made spyware, to be extended to include EncroChat.
Laure Baudrihaye-Gérard, legal director (Europe) of Fair Trials, said the EncroChat hack was a massive fishing expedition by the French police and she told The Epoch Times: “This was just a massive trawl. Mass police surveillance which was contrary to any form of EU rules on privacy and data protection.”
Some time in March 2020 French police, using malware in the form of a software update, managed to hack into EncroChat’s network which was hosted on a server in the town of Roubaix in northern France, and infiltrated tens of thousands of encrypted messages between individuals who used EncroChat phones.
French Police Shared Data With Forces All Over Europe
But French police were already sharing the information they had harvested with law enforcement agencies across Europe via Europol.Britain’s National Crime Agency took the data it had been given by Europol and immediately launched Operation Venetic, passing information to local forces which swooped on suspects all over the country.
The Identities Behind Usualwolf and NudeTrain
Fontaine—whose EncroChat handle was Usualwolf—was said to have supplied a 9 mm Makarov self-loading pistol used to murder Abdullahi Mahamoud in Enfield, north London, on March 19 2020.He later sourced a Walther PPK pistol in Newcastle for Sinclair—whose EncroChat handle was NudeTrain—to murder rival Keiron Hassan, but that attack was thwarted when Hassan was arrested, and later jailed for 20 years, for an unconnected crime in Cardiff.
Two men — Chris Dixon and Elliott Hopewell — who supplied Sinclair with the gun are still awaiting sentencing in Newcastle while another gun supplier, known only by his EncroChat handle, Chestbridge, remains at large.
Acting Detective Inspector John Cowell, an EncroChat expert in the Metropolitan Police, testified in December 2021 at the trial of Anis Hemissi, a Swedish assassin who was jailed for life in February 2022 for murdering gangster Alex Beqiri on the doostep of his London home on Christmas Eve 2019.
Cowell told the trial at Southwark Crown Court, “Between March and June 2020 communications on EncroChat were captured by law enforcement.”
He said EncroChat, which used specially designed Android smartphones, was “highly secure” and this had been its unique selling point in adverts aimed at criminals.
“They said it was like two people in an enclosed room. They guaranteed nobody would find your messages,” said Cowell.
EncroChat Phones Had ‘Panic Wipe’
Prosecutor Peter Ratliff QC asked him, “Was there a panic wipe feature?”“Yes. If you were stopped by law enforcement you could give them a PIN code which would wipe the device,” replied Cowell.
It was suggested during the trial that Hemissi had done just that when police asked him for the PIN number to his own EncroChat phone.
Cowell said: “If you turned the phone on it would look like a normal smartphone. But if you turned it on in a certain sequence it would turn on the secure system.”
He said: “They weren’t widely available in the UK. You couldn’t buy them in Carphone Warehouse or wherever. You had to buy them on the EncroChat website or from a reseller.”
Gwen Jansen, a Dutch defence lawyer and member of the advisory board of the European Criminal Bar Association, said there had been a “mist of secrecy” surrounding the EncroChat hack which had made it hard for people to get a fair trial.
She said lawyers for EncroChat clients in a number of countries were hoping to get their cases looked at by the European Court of Justice and she said she would fight it to the “bitter end.”
Setting a Dangerous Precedent?
Baudrihaye-Gérard agreed: “What sort of precedent does it set? What if they decide to go after WhatsApp next?”“It’s about transparency and accountability. It’s a massively dangerous precedence and dangerous path they’re going down,” Baudrihaye-Gérard added.
In Britain there has already been one attempt to challenge an EncroChat conviction in the Court of Appeal.
Lawyers for a group of anonymous defendants claimed EncroChat data was the same as evidence obtained by phone tapping, which is inadmissible in English and Welsh courts.
But the prosecution claimed it should be treated in the same way as messages on mobile phones, which are admissible in court.
The key was whether, at the point the data was intercepted, it was being “stored in or by” the system by which they were transmitted, or were “being transmitted.”
A group of people who were targeted by the EncroChat investigation have taken their cases to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, a secretive body which supervises warrants for phone tapping and data interception by the police and intelligence services.
The Investigatory Powers Tribunal is set to deliver a final ruling in September.
The Epoch Times reached out to the UK’s National Crime Agency, which said it could not comment while there were “ongoing proceedings.”