French police bust ‘startup’ Air Colis’s drone deliveries to prisons

Deliveries of banned materials to prison inmates by drone have gotten more ambitious and audacious around the world as their frequency multiplied, but the aerial smuggling ring police in western France broke up stands out for its quasi-startup organization and efficiency.

Four participants in the group that had been shuttling contraband into prisons across the western portion of France were arrested after police in Nantes mounted an inquiry into the flows of prohibited phones and drugs discovered during cell searches this summer. What they unearthed was not only a well-organized and oft-deployed system for delivering the loot with DJI Minis but also a Snapchat-based method of confirming orders emanating from inside the clink.

The perpetrators even had a name for their illicit enterprise: Air Colis (Air Parcel).

Police got wise to the scheme when guards first caught sight of a drone hovering in front of a window of a prison in Nantes. The next morning, authorities there turned up 36 smartphones and 1.6 kilos of drugs inmates had stashed away. A month later, screws at another regional penitentiary spotted a UAV providing similar nocturnal deliveries – an activity replicated around the same time at two other jails in the area. 

The recurring spates of drone deliveries to all four jails – often during the same nights – led local gendarmes to begin discreetly investigating. What they gradually uncovered was an operation that might teach struggling Amazon Prime Air a thing or two (albeit nothing legal).

This is how it functioned.

Inmates overseeing contraband sales in their respective prisons would place orders with partners on the outside, who’d, in turn, contact the four organizers of Air Colis. Any single drone payload – whether drugs, iPhones, or tobacco ­­– was limited to 500 grams and cost a flat rate of €400 ($422) to deliver. Contraband to be flown into stir was exchanged at a not-so-secluded-and-secret rendezvous spot (a McDonald’s parking lot in Nantes), where it was weighed and photographed for convicts to confirm the contents on Snapchat as corresponding to their request – a criminal hedge against dissatisfied customer returns. 

Police in Nantes who busted the aerial quartet explained that deliveries dangled from drones would be made directly to recipients waiting at jail windows, directing the craft to their position with light signals. Flights were conducted in the dead of night to the four different prisons in western France and grouped in five to ten missions per outing – meaning, at times, multiple drops were made to the same jail in rapid succession.

It’s estimated Air Colis completed at least 50 deliveries before cops busted the gang and announced details of the operation late in September.

The raid that put an end to the illicit prison airlift turned up nine DJI Minis (at least one original Mavic among them, according to police photos), multiple backup batteries, 500 grams of cocaine, a kilo of hash, €900 ($950) cash, and thermal binoculars for piloting the UAVs to identify the correct cell windows at night.

“It’s like an Uber delivery right to the window,” said Nantes public prosecutor Renaud Gaudeul in announcing the busts. “This was anything but a trivial operation. To my knowledge, there’s never been anything of this scale in France before… It’s good for criminals to realize that investigators have upped their game, too.”

French coppers will need to continue refining their counter-drone efforts if things continue to evolve as they have. According to correctional officials, the estimated 50-plus Air Colis deliveries over the summer on their lonesome neared the 68 total confirmed drone drops to French prisons in 2022. Those were up from 37 the year before. At this rate, the next police sweep will discover inmates using a dedicated app.

Photos: Gendarmerie Nationale