The Belgian police and Customs have intercepted over 27.6 tonnes of cocaine in the Port of Antwerp last month. The findings stem from the rolling down of the encrypted chat service Sky ECC, with which many criminals communicated. According to justice in Belgium, cocaine has a street value of almost 1.4 billion euros.
The hacking of the chat service Sky ECC has hit the criminal world like a bomb. In order to stay out of the sight of the police and the judiciary, criminals are looking for ways to communicate with each other without the investigation services being able to watch – and listen. Sky promised that and guaranteed her customers that the cracking would be impossible. Yet the police have recently succeeded, making millions of messages readable. The police assume that most of Sky’s users are criminal. Since the heist, the number of coke interceptions has also risen sharply. Since the end of February, the Port of Antwerp has been around 27,000 kilos.
According to police, many of the intercepted messages turned out to be a lead to cocaine smuggling. The reports have led to a series of raids and house searches since 20 February. The biggest find was Saturday, April 3. Then 11,000 kilos of cocaine were found in a container on a quay of the port of Antwerp.
Just last Wednesday, the police arrested three Dutch men in the Port of Antwerp, who were planning to ‘extract’ a load of cocaine, as the police call it. Boxes containing a significant amount of cocaine were found in the containers, the public prosecutor of East Flanders announced. The drugs were confiscated. In the past year, dozens of Dutch people were arrested because of similar suspicions.
Also in the Netherlands, arrests were made around the cracking of Sky. A total of 30 arrests were made and 75 homes and offices were searched. Among other things, 28 firearms were seized in Rotterdam. According to police, the investigation, operating under the name Argus, also led to the confiscation of thousands of kilos of cocaine, heroin, and hashish. In addition, several weapons have been seized, drug labs discovered and dismantled and millions of euros have been seized. Also, on the basis of the intercepted instant messages, dozens of investigations are ongoing into liquidations and drug trafficking.
