A Spanish court has delivered one of the most significant rulings yet on prosecutions involving encrypted-phone data, acquitting every defendant in a major cocaine case and throwing the future of Sky ECC prosecutions across Europe into doubt.
In a 44-page judgment cleared for public release today, the Audiencia Provincial de Valencia ruled that messages allegedly sent through the encrypted Sky ECC phone network—which were the only evidence beyond the seized cocaine itself—were not enough to put the defendants behind bars because the defense could not access the raw data.
That raw data includes the original message files, full chat histories, and the technical records needed to check whether messages were missing, edited, or taken out of context.
Relying on the messages in those circumstances, the court said, violated the defendants’ right to a fair trial.
The ruling matters to thousands of defendants far beyond Valencia. Across Europe, people have been charged—and in many cases jailed for decades—on the basis of so-called “chat-only” cases, where alleged encrypted messages were treated as proof even though they came from another jurisdiction, were filtered by police, and could not be independently tested.
In many of those cases, there were no drugs seized and little or no other corroborating evidence.
VICE has obtained and reviewed the full ruling, making this the first report on what the court actually said and why it matters far beyond Spain.
The case relates to a cocaine seizure at the Port of Valencia in August 2020. Customs officers cracked open a shipping container with the serial number FCIU7435572 that was sitting inside APM Terminals, one of Europe’s busiest logistics hubs. Within were 258 pounds of neatly wrapped cocaine, hidden and ready to move. For Spanish authorities, it looked like another major win in Europe’s escalating war on drugs.
But at that point, they had no names and they were yet to gather evidence of any wider conspiracy attached to the seizure. A breakthrough on those fronts came in March 2021, when Spanish police received Sky ECC messages and began using this data to pin responsibility for the shipment on specific individuals. Investigators alleged that these messages also proved that the container had originally held far more cocaine than was found.
According to the Sky ECC messages, the shipment ought to have weighed more than 2,800 pounds. Officers had seized less than a tenth of that. The physical evidence told one story while the chats told another. This gap eventually blew a hole not just in this case, but in the entire model for prosecuting cases involving Sky ECC across Europe.
In the end, every single person charged in connection with this shipment walked free.
For years, many of Europe’s biggest traffickers quietly ran their operations on modified smartphones loaded with Sky ECC software. The Vancouver-based tech firm sold expensive, locked-down privacy tools to anyone willing to pay, without vetting customers or asking how the devices would be used.
Messages were encrypted, routed through offshore servers, and designed to vanish. Cocaine traffickers used them to coordinate shipments, bribe port insiders, hire runners, move money, and settle scores.
“There was nothing else beyond the encrypted messages linking the defendants to what happened”
Julio Sánchez, lead defense lawyer
By the time law enforcement in France, Belgium, and the Netherlands gained access to the network’s systems in March 2021, Sky ECC was the world’s largest encrypted messaging service. They pulled millions of messages from its servers, then rapidly shared the data with police forces across Europe, who rushed to turn it into prosecutions.
Spain joined the party. But in Valencia, the disparity between the 2,800 pounds allegedly mentioned in the messages and the 258 pounds actually seized became impossible to ignore.
There was another problem: Spanish investigators never received any of the original Sky ECC server data. Instead, they simply got heavily filtered extracts, including spreadsheets containing alleged messages, translated conversations, summaries, and police reports assigning encrypted usernames to real people.
Defense lawyers had spent more than four years asking police and prosecutors for the raw material, which included server images, metadata, and forensic records: basically the digital equivalent of fingerprints.
Speaking to VICE, Julio Sánchez, who led the defense, said access to the underlying data was crucial. “There was nothing else beyond the encrypted messages linking the defendants to what happened.”
In courts across Europe, judges were effectively asked to accept a “trust me, bro” version of events, with police interpretations of encrypted data that nobody—including independent digital forensic experts or defense lawyers—could actually double-check.
And that’s where everything finally broke.
In its ruling, the court draws a hard line between intelligence and evidence. Intelligence can guide investigations, but evidence has to survive a courtroom. When encrypted messages are the core of a criminal case, the judges said, the defense must be able to fully examine the original data that those messages came from.
Without that access, the court ruled, there was no way to verify whether the messages presented were complete, accurately attributed, selectively extracted, or even genuine chats at all. And if you can’t verify the data, you can’t convict on it.
The court made clear that European judicial cooperation does not mean blind faith in another country’s police force. Judges said it was not acceptable to rely on evidence with no clear chain of custody—no documented record of where the data came from, how it was handled, or who controlled it along the way.
Mutual recognition between states does not wipe away the right to a fair trial. Courts do not have to accept foreign-filtered digital evidence on trust, especially when people’s freedom is on the line. When alleged encrypted communications become the main proof of guilt and the defense is locked out of the raw data, those communications collapse as evidence.
The ruling doesn’t dispute the cocaine seizure itself. Those drugs were real. And the container existed. What the court rejected was the leap from seized cocaine to criminal responsibility, which is a leap built almost entirely on the alleged Sky ECC messages.
Without independently verifiable digital evidence tying specific defendants to control or coordination of the shipment, prosecutors failed to prove who did what. The result was total acquittal.
Among those cleared were Daniel Serrano Ramos, Fernando Moreno Sorni, Quintín Martínez Albalate, Jokin Larranoa Ariño, Iván Torrijo Ríos, Onofre Garrido Rufino, Andrés Doménech Mocholí, Norman Pérez Galdón, Manuel Garrido Magdaleno, Javier Cutillas Riaza, Borja Manzano Ribes, and Lázaro Antonio Caparrós. The Valencia court said the Sky ECC digital evidence was too weak to overcome the presumption of innocence.
Across Europe, Sky ECC prosecutions followed a familiar script with convictions piling up on untestable chat logs provided by foreign law enforcement.
The reasoning behind the Valencia ruling reaches far beyond this case and carries implications for thousands of prosecutions where encrypted messages are asked to carry the burden of proof, regardless of whether the network involved was Sky ECC or a competitor like EncroChat.
Courts elsewhere in Europe are already reaching similar conclusions. In Italy, two separate courts yesterday dealt fresh blows to prosecutors in cases involving encrypted-platform data obtained via French servers, fully excluding EncroChat evidence in one case and ordering further judicial scrutiny of Sky ECC evidence in another, due to the unavailability of the raw data.
Taken together, these rulings are expected to open the floodgates to innumerable appeals and legal challenges, putting thousands of Sky ECC and EncroChat prosecutions across Europe at risk.
The busts of Sky ECC and EncroChat have delivered mass arrests and easy headlines for almost five years. These rulings show how quickly that success collapses once courts demand to see and test the data, ending an era of encrypted-phone prosecutions built on secrecy, scale, and confidence alone.
In Valencia, the cocaine was real. But the chats were not enough to prove that the full shipment ever existed or that the defendants were responsible for it.
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