Police have announced the removal of two of the largest illegal stores on the Dark Web, the Alavai and Hansa, and experts say the closure of these two dealers is just the beginning.
Through a combination of traditional investigations and online investigations, the FBI managed, in cooperation with European police, to shut down the Alfabay shop, one of the biggest criminal Web sites on the dark Web, and arrested the main perpetrators. Two weeks earlier, Dutch police Hansa's similar site was closed.
This is a painful blow to the dark web community of hundreds of thousands of consumers who have come to Alapay and Hansa after the police shut down the popular Silk Road 2 to buy drugs, weapons, computer hackers and other illegal goods.
However, such sites can be frequent, and authorities often find themselves playing the game "hit the mole" (hitting the mole head that comes out of the hole to get out of another pit) with many dark websites, and there is a consensus among experts The dark web is that there will be more of these shops that have to be closed.
With the complexity of non-disclosure tools such as the Tor network and the use of digital currency, it appears that the best way for law enforcement agencies to arrest Internet criminals and close down their dark Web stores is to keep track of their mistakes.
In December 2016, Alexander Casis, the creator of the Alabbay shop, was discovered by his e-mail address on Hotmail, which he used to send e-mail messages to Alfabay. The police also found the same e-mail address on a French technical troubleshooting site, Full.
He led the investigators to Kazis' account on the LinkedIn Web site, where he reviewed his skills including web hosting and encryption, which reinforced his appearance as a suspect in the case.
Despite all his alleged skills on LinkedIn, the Web site of Epipastek, a front-end pharmaceutical company, was barely working, according to court documents, and the company's account records showed almost no revenue.
As a final nail in the coffin, the authorities obtained Kazys' records on the PayPal electronic payment site, which included the posting of Kazis Mail to Hotmail as a contact information, and the connection of the payment information to Kazis directly with the criminal address; Three years of its launch.
Criminals and secret police alike hide under the anonymity of the Tor network and other safe practices when using a currency to configure and buy illegal goods, making the dark web an ambiguous area of digital crime, where neither side can catch the other unless it falls One is in a slip you reveal