'It was like being sat around a table with Greater Manchester's mafia, listening to them talk'

In the summer of 2020, as the country adapted to lockdown, criminals in Greater Manchester discovered that the game was up for many of them. The means by which they had conducted their activity, and routed their networks of supply and demand for drugs, guns, and gangland hits had been broken.

On July 2nd that year it emerged publicly that the secret EncroChat communications platform used by villains had been hacked by law enforcement. A secret operation, named Venetic, launched by the National Crime Agency, had months earlier taken advantage of data hacked from EncroChat servers by French police.

The network was used exclusively by criminals who bought handsets for up to £1,500 to communicate securely away from law enforcement agencies. 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 ceased when investigators hacked into EncroChat's server in Roubaix, northern France, in April, sending bogus updates to devices across the globe which effectively mined the incriminating data criminals wanted so much to conceal.

In Greater Manchester the investigation of evidence gleaned from Venetic on the region's criminals is Operation Foam. It was described by Detective Supt Joe Harrop head of GMP's Serious and Organised Crime Group as "a once in a lifetime opportunity to deal with the higher echelons of organised crime."

The Manchester Evening News can reveal that so far in Greater Manchester it has resulted in 117 people being sentenced to a total of 1,150 years prison; a further 105 are awaiting trial. GMP received 232 packs of information via the hacking of Encrochat, which