A British court has sentenced a "Corrupt" police analyst to almost four years behind bars for tipping off a friend that officers had compromised the EncroChat encrypted messaging app network. Natalie Mottram, 25, of Warrington, England, was sent down for three years and nine months on Friday at Liverpool Crown Court. In August this year, Mottram pleaded guilty to misconduct in public office, perverting the course of justice, and unauthorized access to computer material. Mottram was collared as part of Operation Venetic, the NCA's codename for the EncroChat takedown. According to the cops, their secret infiltration of the supposedly impregnable chat app, allowing officers to silently read crooks' private messages and probe criminal dealings, has led to action against many of its more than 60,000 users. "There is no place for corrupt officers in UK law enforcement and it was vital that this investigation uncovered her betrayal." In 2020, police in France and the Netherlands led the effort to compromise the communications service. Once they'd busted into the network's servers, cops used that access to collect conversations and other data from EncroChat handsets and use this information to make arrests, with the NCA doing the legwork in the UK. To date, British law enforcement has arrested 3,147 suspects and convicted 1,240 of those based on intel harvested from EncroChat, according to the Crown Prosecution Service. Soon after British police got in on the EncroChat spying action, they realized they had a security problem of their own. According to the NCA, Mottram told Jonathan Kay, 39, the police were monitoring people's encrypted EncroChat conversations, and tipped him off that the cops had intel on him presumably from his use of the app. Then in April 2020, according to the plod, a friend of Kay's pinged another EncroChat user to warn them that the app was under surveillance. In June 2020, investigators suspected Mottram has been alerting people to the covert monitoring of EncroChat, so they placed her under surveillance and asked her to analyze intelligence that mentioned Kay, who was also the boyfriend of Mottram's friend, Leah Bennett, 38. Crucially, the intel had been fabricated by officers to snare Mottram. Cops' total pwnage of 'secure' EncroChat nets 6,500+ arrests, €740m in funds - so far UK cops score legal win in EncroChat snooping op Cops drill into chat apps, sink plot to smuggle tonnes of coke into Europe Five Eyes nations detail dirty dozen most exploited vulnerabilities. The NCA said Mottram, Kay, and Bennett "Had grown close a few years before over a shared love of exercise." We're told Mottram drove to Kay and Bennett's house to warn them about the police file on Kay - which as we know, and she didn't, was deliberately bogus. Mottram, Kay, Bennett, and another were all later arrested that month. The plod seized £200,000 in cash from Kay and Bennett's house. Kay, who earlier admitted perverting the course of justice, was jailed for 30 months on Friday. In addition to warning her friends that they were about to be scooped up in the EncroChat surveillance, evidence presented by the prosecution at trial showed Mottram bought weed from a dealer whose phone number was saved in her mobile phone.
This Cyber News was published on www.theregister.com. Publication date: Thu, 30 Nov 2023 23:19:27 +0000