A corrupt French spy tried to dig up data on Nigel Farage for a darknet client who wrongly believed he was a French tax resident, GB News can reveal.
Christophe Boutry, codenamed “Haurus”, was an officer in France’s domestic intelligence agency before being caught selling secrets from police databases to private clients on the darknet.
As part of details revealed in a 2021 trial, an unknown client with the username “bidule7575” asked Boutry for information on Mr Farage and Paul Manafort, Donald Trump’s former campaign chief.
The client believed both Mr Manafort and the Reform leader were tax residents in France, which was not the case.
Neither request went through, and the client has never been publicly named.
The unknown client also used Boutry to get a year of phone records and GPS locations for a private investigator’s firm, as well as the investigator’s home address, and a woman who had made a complaint against Tariq Ramadan, an Oxford academic accused of sexual harassment.
Boutry traded on Black Hand, a French-language darknet marketplace, selling the bank details, phone records and GPS locations of named people for €100 to €300 per request, paid in bitcoin.
Investigators found that 90 per cent of the searches he ran on internal systems had nothing to do with his job.
He was arrested at the DGSI’s offices on September 18, 2018.
Boutry pleaded guilty to most charges, telling the court he had started selling to pay off debts and that it had become an “addiction”.
He was jailed for seven years, two suspended, and banned from the public service for life.
The sentence was deemed unlawful, and on appeal at Versailles in November 2021, it was cut to five years.
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Prosecutors said Boutry betrayed the French Republic, and data he sold has been linked to gangland killings in Marseille.
In a second case, Boutry’s sentence was raised to seven years in November 2025.
The appeal court in Aix-en-Provence raised it from five years, ruling that he had abused his DGSI post “solely in his own interest and for strictly financial gain”.
Boutry remains under investigation for criminal conspiracy in connection with nine killings.
The shocking details of the scandal come as Mr Farage’s own safety in the UK has become a talking point.
According to his party, he received 597 death threats between February and July, among them a message reading: “Execute the stinking traitor Nigel Farage. TODAY.”
Mr Farage says he gets “about 300 threats a month, almost all through social media”, and has called himself “the most physically and verbally attacked politician of all time”.
In July, he turned down a publicly funded protection package, reportedly a bodyguard, car and driver.
Reform said it amounted to “a reduction of around 75 per cent to protection he already had and which was working”.
Mr Farage says he now pays for private security, claiming a £5million gift from the crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne, now under parliamentary investigation, was for his personal security.
The row sharpened after the death of Ann Widdecombe, the former Conservative minister and Reform spokeswoman, who was found dead at her home in Devon on July 9.
In the wake of her murder, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood promised a review of security for MPs.
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