According to their own statements, the Berlin public prosecutor’s office has so far filed charges in 40 cases around two years after the decryption of data from the Encrochat messenger service.
More than 100 other procedures with at least one identified suspect are still pending, the authority said on request. In another nine cases, the perpetrator must be determined. Because this was unsuccessful or the suspicion was not sufficient, the public prosecutor’s office has discontinued 37 proceedings so far. The identification of suspects is difficult in view of rudimentary chat messages, “paired with jargon related to the environment”.
Encrochat encryption software was used by criminals to conduct illegal business. The service was considered unbreakable because of its complex encryption.
However, in the spring of 2020, the police in the Netherlands and France managed to siphon off millions of secret data. This led to numerous arrests across Europe.
