Officer who helped hack criminals' messages reveals the most 'chilling' thing he discovered

An officer who took part in a massive operation to hack criminals' encrypted messages has spoken out about the most ‘chilling’ thing he came across.

The NCA’s investigation into EncroChat, an encrypted message service used by criminals, was the focus of a Channel 4 documentary Operation Dark Phone: Murder by Text.

French authorities in early 2020 discovered that they were able to hack into the servers hosting EncroChat, uncovering millions of messages that criminals thought were completely hidden away.

This led to numerous arrests and discoveries, including of a Dutch underworld torture chamber.

The National Crime Agency headed up the investigation in the UK, discovering a number of major criminal operations.

Drug smuggling, assassinations, and the sale of firearms were all discovered to be taking place on EncroChat.

Wayne Johns led the NCA’s response to this, called Operation Venetic, which ultimately led to 746 arrests and the seizure of 77 firearms, two tonnes of drugs and £54 million in dirty money.

An attempted grenade attack and botched assassination

The documentary covers a number of shocking discoveries made in the process, most notably a gang war between two North West gangsters.

This shockingly led to an attempted assassination in which a grenade was placed outside a family home as children slept and a mistaken identity shooting, both in Warrington.

The gang war was between Jamie Rothwell and Leon Cullen, with Rothwell organising the shooting of Liam Byrne Jr., an alleged associate of Cullen. However, Byrne's stepfather David Barnes was shot instead in a case of mistaken identity.

When deciding which information to act upon the NCA were wary of letting criminals know that they had infiltrated their messaging service.

Rothwell was arrested in December 2020 (NCA)

Speaking exclusively to LADbible, Wayne Johns explained however that any ‘threats to life’ had to be acted upon, including the attempted assassination by grenade in Warrington.

The grenade did not end up going off as intended, leading bomb disposal units to have to deal with the incident.

Speaking about this, Johns said: “The balance was just around [that the NCA had to] do something, but how can we try and do that and ensure that we don't blow the tactic?”

'The opportunity was immense'

Johns stated that, if it was discovered that they had hacked EncroChat, the UK would be excluded from any further data that could save lives.

Johns explained that there were ‘very clear’ protocols in place when threats were identified.

The docuseries covers the NCA's EncroChat investigation (Channel 4)

When asked about what it was like to receive thousands of messages on EncroChat, some planning murders, he said: “I've never experienced anything like it before.

“We knew at that point the opportunity was absolutely immense, and that you could see the potential of what we could achieve from that data.

“I can think of examples where there was a particular crime group who were intent on trying to murder somebody, and they were disrupted as a consequence of what we were seeing the data. And then they went straight back to planning it again.

“Each time they were disrupted, they blamed everything except the fact the device was compromised.”

'The bit that was quite chilling'

The docuseries re-enacts the casual nature gangsters would have people killed (Channel 4)

When asked specifically about what he saw in the EncroChat messages that most affected him, Johns said that ordinarily the NCA disrupt roughly 120 to 140 threats to life each year.

In the 10 week period before criminals discovered that EncroChat had been compromised, the NCA disrupted over 200.

He said: “That was the bit that was quite chilling in some senses. So the very casual language in terms of how people would talk about killing another human being.

“It's shocking that the cost of how cheap that could be. When you see that 200 times in different contexts, that really is quite worrying.”

The NCA officer, who now leads a team on preventing child sex abuse, stated however that he was ‘incredibly proud’ of the hundreds of lives saved in that time.

The final episode of Operation Dark Phone: Murder by Text is available to watch on Channel 4 tonight at 9pm.