The US authorities have closed the two largest drug trafficking in the darknet: Hansa and AlphaBay

The other day, the US Department of Justice reported on the new achievement of law enforcement officers - they, together with their colleagues from Europol , managed to close the two largest markets from the darknet. These are AlphaBay and Hansa Market. Now there are new details about the operation itself, which turned out to be multi-purpose.

Initially, law enforcement officers eliminated only AlphaBay, whose buyers and sellers began to look for new platforms for buying / selling illegal goods and services. And the “safe haven” was found - it became another market, Hansa. But those users who began to work with this platform did not know one thing. Namely - that the law enforcement authorities of the Netherlands about a month ago seized control of Hansa. So all user operations, their logins, passwords, etc. were recorded by the police.

Well, since after the closure of AlphaBay, Hansa had thousands of new users, all of their data quickly fell into the hands of law enforcement officers. This operation was conceived a long time ago, but only this year the police had a chance to realize their project. According to representatives of Europol, huge amounts of money passed through AlphaBay. Analysts estimate the volume of the black Internet market in billions of US dollars. This money goes to the purchase of drugs, weapons, plastic cards and data on bank accounts of people who have become victims of hackers.
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By the way, earlier it was said that the closure of AlphaBay is the work of the FBI. But as it turned out , both operations were joint, the FBI actively cooperated with Europol. Police work has shaken the resilience of the black internet market. Two liquidated markets with certain consequences for their organizers and users caused the other darknet leaders to be afraid to act - after all, what is the guarantee that the new site they decided to cooperate with is not under police control?

Militiamen are satisfied with the effectiveness of their actions. "This, as far as can be judged, is one of the most important criminal cases of the year," the US Attorney General said at a press conference. “Undoubtedly, law enforcement officers received a difficult problem in the form of criminals who believe that they can act with impunity on the darknet. This case shows that no one is safe. You can not hide. We will find you and de-anonymize your organization or network. And then we will punish you. ”

So far, the names of the criminals, who fell into the attention of the police, are not called. The only thing that became known was the arrest of the AlphaBay organizer, whom they tried to extradite from Thailand. True, he could not be put on trial - he committed suicide while he was in a prison cell in Bangkok.

In addition to information about this person, the police received information from thousands and thousands of other users. According to law enforcement, after the closure of AlphaBay, Hansa’s attendance increased 8 times. The influx was so great that the creators of this market even had to close the possibility of new registrations. According to Europol representatives, the result of the operation is 10,000 postal addresses of Hansa users and tens of thousands of their messages, plus detailed information on purchases and sales.

Unfortunately, the remaining details of the operation remain unknown. How exactly did the police manage to seize control of Hansa? After all, the location of the servers of the market, and all other information is encrypted and reveal it is not so easy.



But it became known about how the creator of AlphaBay was caught. As it turned out, the police received information about him for a long time. The fact is that as a result of a technical failure or an error of the operator of the market, new users of the site began to receive a welcome message from the administrator of AlphaBay. All anything, but this greeting contained an email address, “Pimp_alex_91@hotmail.com”. According to him, it was easy to calculate the attacker's PayPal account. Well, after a time, when it was possible to confirm the involvement of the owner of the address to the operations on AlphaBay, he was arrested in his own house in Bangkok.

During the arrest, the police discovered a laptop, deprived of any protection (no encryption, no passwords, nothing). On the display there was an open AlphaBay, and the owner of the laptop just logged in and did not have time to log out. According to the Thai police, the size of the state of the market operator at the time of his arrest was $ 23 million.

When asked whether the Dutch police were able to de-anonymize Tor, law enforcement officials said: “No. But even if that were the case, we wouldn’t tell you anyway. ”

Of course, this operation can be called very successful. But all this does not mean that the police won an unconditional and final victory. There are other markets in Tor, they are not so few. And users who have lost access to two familiar sites at once, without any doubt, will go in search of new places on the darknet. And the fight against drugs and the arms trade is like the fight against the hydra - instead of one liquidated organization, a few more appear. The battle is won by the police, but there are still many battles ahead. And we will undoubtedly hear about the results of some of them.