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  • 7 weeks ago
Operation Dark Phone- Murder By Text Season 1 Episode 1
Transcript
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00:00:21I don't know.
00:00:51I don't know.
00:01:21I don't know.
00:01:51I don't know.
00:02:21I don't know.
00:02:50I don't know.
00:03:20I don't know.
00:03:50I don't know.
00:04:20I don't know.
00:04:50I've got an Encro check phone which is unlocked.
00:04:53When we first seized the Encro phones, all we saw was your normal phone with a normal screen, messages, emails, camera, gallery, nothing else there.
00:05:03But by turning them on in a certain way, you were able to access a secure side, you had a clean side and a dirty side, the easiest way to explain it.
00:05:15It had a burn capability.
00:05:45They were untouchable.
00:05:46They were untouchable.
00:05:46They were untouchable.
00:05:46I know, it was fine.
00:05:47I don't know.
00:05:56I don't know.
00:06:26I don't know.
00:06:56We know from our intelligence that EncroChat was being used by organised crime gangs in
00:07:15a way that we can't see.
00:07:17Orchestrating and organising importations of drugs and firearms, money laundering, conspiring
00:07:23to cause serious violence or even to kill, all of that needs them to be able to link
00:07:28up.
00:07:29And that's exactly what EncroChat was for them.
00:07:31It was a bit like a LinkedIn of organised crime.
00:07:36In the criminal underworld, it was word of mouth, get these devices.
00:07:41So, you had resellers operating in back streets, small computer shops, mobile phone shops,
00:07:47throughout the world.
00:07:48The fact that you've got an EncroPhone means you're paying a lot of money out, ten times the
00:08:00amount of a normal contract.
00:08:03But it opened up doorways.
00:08:04You could almost instantly elevate your position within the criminal world.
00:08:10Across the UK, they had 10,000 users.
00:08:11But the global reach was truly amazing.
00:08:17You had Portugal, Spain, France, the Netherlands, right the way through the rest of Eastern Europe
00:08:24into Turkey, and then you start talking about the Middle East, Dubai, into the Far East, Hong
00:08:31Hong Kong, China, EncroChat had appeared in Colombia, 60,000 users worldwide.
00:08:52It was the opportunity to be truly global.
00:08:56EncroChat was a really difficult problem for us, because it was a really difficult problem
00:09:25for us, because it was frustrating so many of our operations.
00:09:32But we believed that the servers that we EncroChat devices were connecting up to were based in France.
00:09:40And that's why we knew that we needed to start working with a range of law enforcement,
00:09:45intelligence analysts in different parts of the world, because we needed to crack EncroChat.
00:09:50And there was a great degree of secrecy around what was going to happen.
00:10:05Did you work on the EncroChat hack?
00:10:07I cannot confirm or deny that I worked on or any part of this investigation.
00:10:16There isn't a huge difference between my job and that of a hacker, except that I'm not trying to commit crimes based on the information that I have.
00:10:23EncroChat market themselves as unbreakable.
00:10:27And I think it's important to remind people that nothing is unbreakable.
00:10:31So you always look for the weakest link in the chain and that's where you attack.
00:10:36There was something that could be done without actually breaking the encryption.
00:10:45And that is to push all users updated version of EncroChat.
00:10:51But actually, it's a fake update.
00:10:53And this fake update contained an implant.
00:10:56And what this implant would do is essentially capture messages before they were encrypted
00:11:03and send them not to the EncroChat server, but to a server operated by the French police.
00:11:10It's very clever because users of EncroChat are security conscious.
00:11:14So when they receive a security update, that's the first thing they want to do.
00:11:17Our team had gone out for what they thought was a fairly routine meeting.
00:11:24And it was actually then a real jaw-dropping moment when they came back and said,
00:11:28the French are able to get inside EncroChat.
00:11:34The briefing started.
00:11:36It's all very hush-hush.
00:11:38And it was something along the lines of,
00:11:39imagine being able to see everybody's Encro messages.
00:11:42And the initial thought was,
00:11:45Wow, I'm going to have access to all this information that I've never had before.
00:11:56This moment when you press the button,
00:12:00this is a very intense moment because you are working with a nuclear weapon, in a sense,
00:12:06that's about to detonate.
00:12:08This is much more power than we ever had as investigators.
00:12:11But at this point, it may not work in the real world.
00:12:16It may still fail because you made a silly mistake.
00:12:24And then you press the button and you don't see it happening right away.
00:12:28It's silence.
00:12:29Thank you very much.
00:12:33You're welcome.
00:12:35Let's get started.
00:12:37You're welcome.
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00:16:12So, have we got a victim in this one? Do we know anything about the victim?
00:16:16No.
00:17:46Because Liv Long wasn't in the UK, we didn't get his phone data. We only got his data when he spoke to somebody new too, ball sniffer.
00:18:02He would speak to Keyhole. So, you start to build that picture.
00:18:09Reading their messages?
00:18:27Reading their messages? You knew straight away he's a violent person.
00:18:40He was всё.
00:18:42His head of the significant organised crime group, operating predominantly within Cheshire. He was surmount of drug supply and would willingly...
00:18:55I hear a lot of fear at the other office, but there's some sort of criminal fault.
00:19:01A handle called Ace Prospect, and it was clear from the message we'll do.
00:19:06With Cullen in prison, the person behind the handle...
00:19:25...causing dangers to other individuals, and his exact words were, I think there's a grenade.
00:19:54Had an EncroChat messages, it means on that particular occasion, the address itself was actually contained with a...
00:20:00And the intended target, it was associated to LiveLong and the grenade.
00:20:09It's under a bush outside a residential address, where there's a couple living and a child.
00:20:15And you think, oh.
00:20:18And when you go through the data, you've got a person who's had it planted there,
00:20:23who's saying, don't worry about the kid, he's not old enough to pick it up.
00:20:26It's safe as best we can.
00:20:38To the public and to the residents, but clearly the biggest...
00:20:42What's at that point is, this is the start of a real escalation in hostilities,
00:20:55the start of some kind of gang war, and we're going to start seeing tit-for-tat.
00:21:00But that becomes a real challenge.
00:21:03Violent creature.
00:21:14It was only after that incident that we realised individuals were...
00:21:19..just kept going.
00:21:23We were getting...
00:21:24Our work was expanding exponentially.
00:21:28But also with a backdrop of a pandemic and a lockdown,
00:21:31we were losing officers to COVID, and that in itself was quite problematic.
00:21:36But everybody cracked on with it, because that's all we could do.
00:21:39You can't stop in law enforcement.
00:21:42Those handles are.
00:21:43It doesn't matter what criminalities committed on that device,
00:22:12if you can't put it in somebody's hand, there's no point in having a phone call
00:22:15telling me that live-long is Jamie Rothwell.
00:22:21James 2, I was undoubtedly one of the NCA's...
00:22:24Jamie Rothwell as a criminal has been known since he went to it quite early,
00:22:28and then it just escalated into more serious...
00:22:30This is everything.
00:22:32The role of people who had tans getting cosmetic surgery, et cetera,
00:22:35is all part of the lifestyle of a new generation of criminals.
00:22:39..or for a criminal to get...
00:22:42..revious murders.
00:22:43The extreme violence that was used goes beyond what you would normally see.
00:22:48Turned out that same weapon was used in the shooting of a mother
00:22:51and a seven-year-old child on their own doorstep
00:22:54to prevent this escalation, to prevent this...
00:22:56..and base himself abroad, where he could sit on his encro.
00:23:00Dangerous as an individual he was.
00:23:02That absolute...
00:23:03It's going straight down, I'll be there in a sec, yeah.
00:23:13Bank holding Monday, I was sat at home.
00:23:15When you think about it, isn't it?
00:23:17Those reach...
00:23:20So a military weapon that you would normally see the Russians using,
00:23:23for example, in a film.
00:23:24One times Tech-9, 200-400 suites.
00:23:29One by Uzi, 200-400 suites.
00:23:36Uzi, made famous through Arnold Schwarzenegger,
00:23:38but again, a machine...
00:23:39..on my mind.
00:23:41We're constantly speaking with the Firearms Threat Centre,
00:23:44with the Dutch, with the French colleagues, to say,
00:23:47can you give me more information around the firearms?
00:23:49Is there anything you're seeing that we're not?
00:23:51We're still thinking, he's lived long behind it.
00:24:05Until that...
00:24:06And then it became clear, he had a man on the ground.
00:24:08And then he had a man on the ground.
00:24:39Comes out of the room and walks toward the Alde.
00:24:42And we're going to see individuals purchasing a weapon of mass destruction.
00:24:47You fire that into...
00:24:48If one's gone, where are the rest?
00:25:13Well, where's the Scorpion?
00:25:14Where's the Uzi?
00:25:15Where's the black AK-47?
00:25:17We need the guns off the streets.
00:25:19Multiple, multiple firearms have been handed out by the same person.
00:25:24The...
00:25:25And we'd identified a handle, a legend can.
00:25:30Elusive wool is told who and when to give firearms to.
00:25:38He's told to do that by Ace Prospect.
00:25:39The gun list, if you were buying one of those guns,
00:25:50you really wouldn't even know.
00:25:52We had two crime bosses
00:25:53that were effectively...
00:25:54had purchased a firearm inadvertently from the...
00:25:58the other side of your mind you're thinking
00:26:00could be trouble
00:26:01because it's more threat.
00:26:03Ace Prospects is broad in Cullen OCG.
00:26:31He's been injured, shot, harmed or killed.
00:26:38You know, and for the...
00:26:40While he's targeting people, he believes are linked to the OCG.
00:26:48A marketplace.
00:26:52We've got somebody who is a fugitive abroad,
00:26:55but he was able to make other people
00:26:57doing parts for us.
00:26:58He had numerous weapons,
00:27:01strolling, directing people to...
00:27:03He was somebody who...
00:27:03Oh, yeah.
00:27:08Oh, yeah.
00:27:21Oh, yeah.
00:27:22Oh, yeah.
00:27:23I'm sorry.
00:27:24I'm sorry.
00:27:25I'm sorry.
00:27:25You've got to get the out of the house or shot in.
00:27:45But the likelihood of something happening, there was still push.
00:27:50The next day, out of nowhere, there, the occupants were uninjured.
00:27:54You gave an additional level of sophistication and intent that was really disturbing.
00:28:01Everyone that was involved in this was effectively...
00:28:05And we get more and more and more details.
00:28:08And it's quite frightening.
00:28:11But you are dealing with people's lives.
00:28:14We have to do something.
00:28:16Live Long says this individual, Live Long, is a priority for the agency to find, locate,
00:28:24trace, arrest.
00:28:25So I knew at that point, my job, myself, this isn't going to carry on.
00:28:30This is going to turn into an international manhunt.
00:28:36Jamie Rothwell has now made the fatal error.
00:28:40We're at a pivotal moment.
00:28:42We cannot just, we cannot just.
00:28:45I was feeding back to the French and the Underworld prison and an Underworld torture facility.
00:28:50I was like, wow, a torture chamber.
00:28:53We call in Explosive Ordnance Disposal, the Bomb Squad in order to make this divide.
00:29:04It means evacuating houses.
00:29:06It means massive disruption to the public and the residents.
00:29:08But clearly the biggest risk is of that device actually exploding.
00:29:20When the grenades discovered, the clear thought gang war and we're going to start seeing tit-for-tat
00:29:27in terms of protecting the public.
00:29:31When the grenades discovered, the clear thought gang war and we're going to start seeing tit-for-tat
00:29:43in terms of protecting the public.
00:29:45In a clear thought gang war and we're going to start seeing tit-for-tat in terms of wrestling.
00:30:07Ace Prospect, he was, and utterly, he took some deep joy in that detonation, and Ace
00:30:27Prospect was hell-bent on getting revenge on Live Long. And I think you've just got to
00:30:37take him off the street, really. You've just got, you know, you've got to take him out,
00:30:39there's no option about it. But in reality, nobody knew who those are.
00:30:49Everybody thought it would last a couple of days and then that would be it, but it didn't.
00:30:52Getting more and more and more messages. So our work was expanding exponentially.
00:31:00It's imperative to start to find out who those handles are.
00:31:06So you're looking at everything, anything that's going to give you a clue as to who these people are.
00:31:22So
00:31:30so
00:31:32so
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