PRIVACY IS PRICELESS
Fontaine—whose EncroChat handle was Usualwolf—was said to have supplied a 9 mm Makarov self-loading pistol used to murder Abdullahi Mahamoud in Enfield, north London, on March 19 2020.
He later sourced a Walther PPK pistol in Newcastle for Sinclair—whose EncroChat handle was NudeTrain—to murder rival Keiron Hassan, but that attack was thwarted when Hassan was arrested, and later jailed for 20 years, for an unconnected crime in Cardiff.
Two men — Chris Dixon and Elliott Hopewell — who supplied Sinclair with the gun are still awaiting sentencing in Newcastle while another gun supplier, known only by his EncroChat handle, Chestbridge, remains at large.
Acting Detective Inspector John Cowell, an EncroChat expert in the Metropolitan Police, testified in December 2021 at the trial of Anis Hemissi, a Swedish assassin who was jailed for life in February 2022 for murdering gangster Alex Beqiri on the doostep of his London home on Christmas Eve 2019.
Cowell told the trial at Southwark Crown Court, “Between March and June 2020 communications on EncroChat were captured by law enforcement.”
He said EncroChat, which used specially designed Android smartphones, was “highly secure” and this had been its unique selling point in adverts aimed at criminals.
“They said it was like two people in an enclosed room. They guaranteed nobody would find your messages,” said Cowell.
He said EncroChat phones had settings which allowed the user to set a “burn time” of between one second and 14 days, which meant you could not only delete messages on your handset after you had sent them, but you could also wipe them from the handset of the person who received them.
PRIVACY IS PRICELESS
