Greek Predatorgate surveillance scandal

The Greek 'Predatorgate' scandal — also called the Greek Watergate — was a sprawling surveillance affair that erupted in 2022 when it emerged that journalists, opposition politicians, ministers and senior officials had been targeted both by the state intelligence service and by the commercial Predator spyware sold by the Athens-based Intellexa alliance (and its component firm Cytrox).

What happened

The scandal surfaced in stages. In early 2022, financial journalist Thanasis Koukakis discovered, with help from Citizen Lab, that his phone had been infected with Predator — invasive mercenary spyware that can silently access a device's messages, microphone and camera. Months later, on 26 July 2022, Nikos Androulakis, leader of the opposition PASOK-KINAL party and a Member of the European Parliament, revealed an attempted Predator infection of his own phone.

Investigations documented that around 92 smartphones had been targeted via roughly 220 malicious SMS messages sent through bulk-messaging services, with infection links sometimes appearing to originate from a number linked to the Prime Minister's office. Targets spanned businessmen, prosecutors, military officers, government ministers and journalists. Predator relied on zero-day and n-day exploit chains (in Chrome, Android and later iOS) to compromise fully-patched phones.

Impact

• Approximately 92 phones were targeted; confirmed Predator victims included journalists and the leader of a parliamentary opposition party.
• On 5 August 2022, Grigoris Dimitriadis (the PM's nephew and general secretary) and Panagiotis Kontoleon, head of the EYP national intelligence service, both resigned.
• The affair triggered a European Parliament PEGA committee inquiry into spyware abuse across the EU.

Resolution

In a landmark ruling on 26 February 2026, an Athens court convicted four individuals — including executives of the Intellexa spyware business and two Israeli nationals — of unlawfully accessing information systems, violating communications privacy and interfering with personal-data systems, handing down prison sentences. Human-rights groups described it as a rare instance of judicial accountability for commercial spyware abuse.

Why it matters

Predatorgate is one of Europe's most consequential mercenary-spyware scandals. It demonstrated that EU-based vendors could supply intrusion tools used against a member state's own journalists and politicians, blurring the line between lawful intelligence and illegal surveillance. It fuelled EU-wide debate over spyware regulation, contributed to U.S. sanctions and visa restrictions on the Intellexa group, and — through the 2026 convictions — set an early precedent that executives behind such tools can face criminal liability.