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The latest case was revealed Thursday after Quebec police and RCMP officers said that more than one million instant messages sent through BlackBerrys helped gather evidence on two alleged organized crime groups.

This isn’t the first time police have said the supposedly uncrackable BlackBerry technology helped them capture an alleged crime ring, and it raises questions about whether BlackBerry messages are truly as secure as the company claims.

“It’s a problem in the way that BlackBerry has marketed some of its services to the consumer market,” said Christopher Parsons, a fellow at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, which specializes on how privacy is affected by digital surveillance.

“It’s a very difficult security posture and probably one that most users … don’t fully understand.”

Parsons said many BlackBerry owners assume incorrectly that their smartphones meet the same standards as BlackBerrys used by major corporations and the U.S. government, even though they’re not operating on the same high-level security servers that have come to define the company’s advantage over its competitors.

The RCMP said Thursday that 33 people were rounded up in Montreal, Quebec City, Laval and Gatineau, after investigators used a technique to intercept more than one million private PIN to PIN messages.

The company has traditionally encouraged its users to consider PIN to PIN messages as “scrambled” rather than “encrypted.”