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Drug dealer nabbed by cops thanks to a cheesy photo

There’s an old adage I’m sure we all know – never post a photo of yourself holding Mature Blue Stilton or the police might use it to fingerprint you and ultimately arrest you.

Nobody else knows that saying? That might explain why a drug dealer in the UK has been arrested after doing exactly what the saying says you shouldn’t.

Carl Stewart faces 13 years and six months in prison after the Liverpool Crown Court accepted his please of guilty to charges of conspiracy to supply cocaine, heroin, MDMA and ketamine as well as transferring criminal property.

His crime isn’t interesting but how police caught Stewart is.

According to Merseyside Police, Stewart used a platform known as EncroChat to conduct business and evade the eye of the law. EncroChat devices are specially configured to encrypt all data but last year in July the service was compromised by European authorities.

Whether Stewart was aware of this or not is unclear but we’re leaning toward the latter because he decided to post a photo of Mature Blue Stilton while shopping for whatever reason, leaving his fingerprints and palm in full view of the camera.

“Carl Stewart was involved in supplying large amounts of class A and B drugs, but was caught out by his love of Stilton cheese, after sharing a picture of a block of it in his hand through encrochat. His palm and fingerprints were analysed from this picture and it was established they belonged to Stewart,” said Detective Inspector Lee Wilkinson.

What makes this even more incredible is that as you can see in a copy of the photo below, the fingerprints aren’t all that clear but we suspect that this photo coupled with access to EncroChat and a chat with Marks and Spencer about its blue cheese loving customers were enough to do Stewart in.

As cool as this story is, there is a dark side to it. Being able to identify fingerprints from an image is something we certainly didn’t think authorities were doing. While technology helps authorities it can also cause trouble for citizens just going about their lives, especially if those solutions are built with bias loaded in.

So while tech helping police catch a Stilton loving drug dealer is cool, we should be cautious about how tech like is being applied so that it doesn’t end up hindering us all.

Smells like 13 years 6 months in prison.

[Header Image – CC 0 Pixabay]

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