Police obtain crime gangs’ calls, chats
The Greek police has recently, and belatedly, gained access to the full trove of data from two, now defunct, communications networks used heavily by criminals due to their encrypted communications capabilities.
Kathimerini has learned that the data became available to the Hellenic Police about 20 days ago and that it includes 4,500 recorded conversations, 28 million messages and 250,000 photos.
The defunct networks, EncroChat and SkyGlobal, were forced to shut down in 2020 and 2021, respectively. At the time of its closure, in 2020, the former had about 60,000 subscribers.
Ever since, European police have been making use of the data to track down criminals. In 2023, for example, 108 suspected members of Italian crime syndicate Ndrangheta were arrested in operation “Eureka.”
That same year, Europol announced that thanks to the data contained in EncroChat, 6,500 arrests had been made, more than 700 million euros recovered and more than 100 tons of cocaine impounded.
In Greece, it was the counternarcotics division of the police that started seeking the data, ahead of the homicides section. They were initially assisted by police in Austria, Belgium and France, in addition to the Europol.
In the past couple of years, Greek police officers, traveling to Europol’s headquarters in The Hague, had got some limited information from the defunct networks’ data that helped in the arrests of some drug dealers.
More recently, they got their hands on communications related to assassination contracts by the so-called “Greek Mafia” that also involved foreign operatives, mostly from Montenegro and Serbia.
