Justice Dept. announces takedown of dark web drug market

Their efforts, they said, coincided with Dutch authorities shuttering another illicit online market, known as Hansa Market. Bayonet’s focus was takedown of both Hansa Market and AlphaBay in the course of the same multi-agency investigation.

“What this meant was that we could disrupt and then sweep up all those new users.” said Rob Wainwright, the director of Europol, who was on hand for the press conference.

During the press conference, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein echoed these sentiments and warned prospective dark net customers and traders that Tor would not necessarily shield their identities. Hansa’s servers were seized in the Netherlands, Germany and Lithuania.

“There are more of these operations to come”, a Europol official stated. Authorities say Cazes was the “creator and administrator” of AlphaBay. The Atlanta office of the FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Georgia also have identified an AlphaBay staff member living in the United States, an investigation that is still ongoing, according to the Justice Department.

As part of the operation, Dutch police took control of Hansa after it was seized in June. There, buyers and sellers are anonymous, and so is the currency, with most transactions happening through bitcoin.

Law enforcement officials have struggled for years to crack down on these marketplaces, which are hard to locate because their software is distributed across the Tor network, which anonymises users and makes them nearly impossible to track. Since AlphaBay’s demise, that has jumped to 700 to 800 new listings – a five-fold increase.

While firearms represent less than 1 percent of total items sold on dark web marketplaces, the report’s authors said the “volume can be considered sufficiently high to be cause for concern for policy makers and law enforcement agencies”.

AlphaBay went offline on July 4. “They think they will get away with it because there are too many players and too many countries, they think they will get away with it because the schemes are too complex and because they operate in the shadows”.

AlphaBay’s suspected founder, Alexandre Caze, was arrested earlier this month in Thailand at the request of USA officials.

Law enforcement leaders called security practices of Cazes sloppy, which led to his arrest.

Dark net markets enable large-scale trading in chiefly illegal goods, such as drugs, weapons, child pornography, and ransom software. Cazes was the subject of a multi-count racketeering and drug sales indictment filed by the USA attorney for the eastern district of California.

“Among other challenges, our great country is now in the midst of the deadliest drug crisis in our history”.

The U.S. DOJ said in a statement that the so-called dark web marketeplace AlphaBay has been used to sell deadly illegal drugs such as fentanyl and heroin, stolen and fraudulent identification documents and access devices, counterfeit goods, malware and other computer hacking tools, firearms, and toxic chemicals since its creation in 2014.