A big-time drug dealer has been jailed after a simple police visit to a butcher’s shop unmasked him. Dean Cooper, 51, supplied £3.68m of cocaine, £900,000 of heroin and other drugs, including ketamine, amphetamine and 50kg of cannabis resin in his major criminal operation.
He was finally brought to justice thanks to Operation Venetic, a long-running investigation into communications between criminals on EncroChat. For years, the totally legal EncroChat service allowed 50,000 users around the world – 9,000 of them in the UK – to communicate in the knowledge none of their texts would be uncovered by law enforcement.
That ended when investigators hacked into EncroChat’s server in Roubaix, northern France, in April 2020, sending bogus updates to devices across the globe which effectively mined the incriminating data criminals wanted so much to conceal.
Cooper, who flooded Manchester with the drugs, is the latest criminal to be brought to justice. He used the handle Berrystar on EncroChat… Click here to continue reading.
