Sixteen people connected to a south London gang called the 67 were sentenced to a total of 61 years for county lines drug offences. Police sifted through hundreds of thousands of pages of call data to identify the culprits.

Fifteen men and one woman were convicted after a joint investigation by the Metropolitan and Kent police forces into five county lines supplying drugs in Berkshire, Hampshire, Kent, London, Surrey and Sussex.

Those found guilty included line holders, who managed them from London and directed younger members of the gang to “cuckoo” addresses, often belonging to local drug users, in the south-east where they would sell drugs.