Dutch police located five more methamphetamine labs in 2023 than during the same period last year, the Netherlands Forensic Institute announced on Wednesday.
In 2021 and 2022, the officials found 15 production facilities. During the first 11 months of 2023, 20 were discovered.
The past three years have seen a drop on 2020, when the police found a record-breaking 32 labs. The police attribute that outlier year to the decryption of Encrochat messages.
That year, some 20 million exchanges by criminals on the network were read by police before they could be encrypted in what police call ‘an earthquake for organised crime’. EncroChat has around 50,000 users worldwide,12,000 of whom live in the Netherlands.
