“Brain” behind EncroChat extradited to France
February 9, 2024

One of the key people behind setting up the EncroChat company was extradited from the Dominican Republic to France this week to face trial. Paul Krusky (54) was arrested in the Dominican Republic in May 2022 and has been under house arrest since then.

Criminal organization
He is suspected in France of participating in a criminal organization that traded in drugs and weapons and of setting up an illegal communications service.

According to French justice, Canadian Krusky was one of the people who set up EncroChat's business model and made the sale and marketing of the devices possible. Krusky has been developing Encro since 2012 .

An international arrest warrant was issued for Krusky in July 2021. At the request of the Public Prosecution Service of Lille (Lille), he was extradited to France last week.

In 2022, there were raids in several countries. Krusky was then arrested , but was released again

Software
EncroChat was a communications system where customers purchased telephones with software installed on them. The phones could only be used for chatting. The intention was that the investigating authorities would never be able to make the messages readable. But that did happen.

In 2020, the police dismantled the EncroChat system in an international action, after several months of live reading of messages sent by users with a certain type of Encro phone.

Roubaix
Encro had many users, especially in the Netherlands, and the police regularly came across these types of phones in criminal investigations. Dutch specialists discovered in 2017 that EncroChat had hosted its servers at one of the largest hosting companies in the world: OVH. The users' encrypted messages were sent around the world from an OVH branch in Roubaix, France.

26Bismarck
At that time, an investigation into the executives behind the EncroChat company started in France, and a similar investigation started in the Netherlands 26Bismarck. It was later agreed that France would prosecute EncroChat's leadership. The Netherlands continued its criminal investigation into 26Oakmont: into resellers of Encro devices.

The Dutch justice department focused on the legible messages from the thousands of Dutch users of EncroChat. Justice states that it was clear that EncroChat was a criminal organization and that the users were all criminals.

Other countries received Encro data from users who worked or stayed there.

More suspects
In 2020, the live operation was against EncroChat. Between 2020 and 2023, more than 6,500 suspects were arrested and at least €900 million in assets were seized, according to Eurojust.

More suspects are on trial in France in the Encro investigation. In 2022, Spanish suspects were extradited to France.

Various European procedures are still ongoing regarding the extent to which the hack on EncroChat was permitted .