Detectives say tools supplied by Palantir were integral to convictions of a criminal gang that stole £800,000
It was fraud on a grand scale. The “Fuck the Police” criminal gang based in Luton and Romania stole £800,000 in more than 3,000 withdrawals from cash machines in dozens of locations throughout 2024.
The police investigation matched the crime in its complexity. When detectives in Bedfordshire seized the suspects’ two dozen smartphones, they were faced with a mountain of potential digital evidence – 1.4 terabytes of information, according to the authorities, connecting co-conspirators across eastern England and the Bacau region of Romania.
Alongside human intelligence, forensics and the other mainstays of traditional policing, detectives increasingly face dauntingly vast reservoirs of digital information that could contain vital clues.
The data haul, which covered messages, geolocation positions, emails, notes and photographs, was equivalent to about 500,000 ebooks and would ordinarily take months, if not years, to comb through.
