The now-imprisoned boss of the Sinaloa Cartel Joaquin Guzman, also known as "El Chapo", and notorious British drug lord Robert Dawes have apparently employed similar technological measures to keep their communications secret, the Daily Star reports.
According to the newspaper, prior to his arrest and subsequent extradition to the US where he got sentenced to life in jail, El Chapo outfitted his underlings with customized handsets, each containing an encrypted SIM and a "self-destruct" function that would wipe the device if a special code was entered.
And it appears that Guzman wasn't the only criminal mastermind to use such tech, as in the UK, drug kingpin Robert Dawes, who was jailed back in 2018, employed “these special encrypted handsets with a No1BC system” in order to keep his identity hidden.
As the newspaper claims, not only weren't some of Dawes' underlings aware who they were working for, evidence from National Crime Agency (NCA) suggests he was “the first criminal to adopt the system”.
"These were major players in control of a phone network which could not be penetrated", one NCA officer said. "Dawes has always been very switched on with his comms. But once he had control of this secret end-to-end encryption it became more difficult."
The officer added that Dawes "would not deal with anyone on anything sensitive unless they were on this network."
"It was also the first time we had seen a whole organised crime group operating in a number of countries including the UK using the same network like this", they remarked. "We were shooting blind because we weren’t picking up on these comms once the No1BC system was being used."
