A 37- year-old man has been charged with conspiracy to supply Class A and B drugs.
On Sunday (October 17) officers arrested Michael Martin of Dover Road, Maghull, on suspicion of conspiracy to supply Class A and B drugs after his vehicle was stopped by police on Queens Drive in Liverpool.
Yesterday (Monday) he was charged with conspiracy to supply cocaine and heroin and conspiracy to supply firearms.
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He has been remanded in custody and appeared at Wirral Magistrates adult remand court.
The charge forms part of the Merseyside Police response to Operation Venetic: a national investigation into the use of encrypted mobile devices, commonly referred to as Encrochat.
The EncroChat hack, carried out in April of last year, gave detectives unprecedented access to the private conversations of some of the UK's biggest criminals.
The mass hack is said to have underpinned gun smuggling and murder plots, and was built on a police operation in northern France.
Detectives stumbled across technology used to run EncroChat, an encrypted communications network, near the Belgian border last year.
Prior to this, EncroChat had been a thorn in the side of detectives for several years.
Around 60,000 users of EncroChat have been identified worldwide, with about 10,000 of them in the UK – all involved in coordinating and planning the supply and distribution of drugs and weapons, money laundering and other criminal activity.
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