A joint international law enforcement effort has taken down two of the largest black market websites on the dark web in a “groundbreaking operation,” Europol and the U.S. Department of Justice announced on Thursday.
The task force, led by the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Agency and various European law enforcement agencies under Europol, has reportedly seized and shut down AlphaBay and Hansa, the former largest and third largest dark web marketplaces respectively.
The sting is being called the “most sophisticated takedown operation ever seen in the fight against online criminal activities,” according to a Europol and DOJ press release. Both dark web sites were only accessible through the Tor network, and it’s not currently clear how the agencies were able to find their servers or administrators, The Verge reported.
The news follows the unexpected shutdown of AlphaBay about two weeks ago, an event that spurred many users to migrate to another marketplace: Hansa. Unbeknownst to those users, Hansa was seized by the agencies shortly thereafter and was being secretly operated by Dutch National Police to collect a significant amount of data on both buyers and sellers. In the wake of AlphaBay’s shutdown, Hansa’s user base increased about eight-fold, Europol said.
Since it was founded in 2014, AlphaBay had racked up roughly $1 billion in transactions, mostly in drugs and counterfeit identification documents. But both sites also hosted weapons, chemicals and cybercrime malware. During the Hansa sting, Dutch authorities reportedly collected more than 10,000 buyer addresses and seized over $2 million worth of Bitcoin.
The operation is one of the largest coordinated law enforcement efforts aimed at the dark web, and will likely turn out to be just as prolific as the shutdown of the original Silk Road. U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions called it “one of the most important criminal investigations of this entire year.”
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