Two of the biggest criminal dark web markets, AlphaBay and Hansa, have been shut down by a police sting. These markets were responsible for the trading of over 350 000 illicit goods such as drugs, firearms and cybercrime malware. Europol described it as one of the most “sophisticated takedown operations ever seen in the fight against criminal activities online”.
“This day will appear in the history books I am sure of it. This is a real blow to criminals around the world. It was a really beautiful, well planned operation,” says Julio Hernandez-Castro at the University of Kent.
Websites on the dark web can only be accessed using software that maintains anonymity. This makes it an obvious place to host online markets, similar in style to eBay but with illegal items also for sale. Because both the customers and the sellers on dark web markets are anonymous, it is particularly difficult to halt the activity or track down the people involved.
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Unless, that is, you control the markets. The Dutch police and Europol first gained control of Hansa on June 20, but didn’t immediately shut it down. Instead, they waited for the FBI get hold of AlphaBay a few weeks later on 5 July.
Knock on the door
The FBI then shut down AlphaBay and over the following weeks there was a huge migration of users from AlphaBay to Hansa, all of which was tracked by the European part of the team. Though it’s very difficult to trace users on the dark web, on the markets buyers regularly use their own addresses when making a purchase.
Hansa was finally shut down today, but not before 10 000 addresses were collected. “If you’ve bought a small bag of weed for personal consumption you’ll be a low priority for Europol, but anyone that bought a kilogram of MDMA, clearly not for personal consumption, is likely to get a knock on their door pretty soon,” says Hernandez-Castro.
AlphaBay was the largest marketplace on the dark web. It had over 200 000 users and 40 000 vendors. There was a quarter of a million listing for illegal drugs and a hundred thousand listings for stolen or fraudulent documents, counterfeit goods, and hacking tools. It’s estimated that over $1 billion was spent through the platform since its creation in 2014.
A market place called The Dream Market is the second largest, with Hansa the third. With two out of the three largest marketplaces in the hands of law enforcement, anyone using The Dream Market will find it hard to dismiss the possibility that it is also compromised.
Though this will temporarily slow the sale of illegal items on the dark web, it will only be a matter of time before new websites spring up, says Gareth Owenson at University of Portsmouth. “ The Silk Road used to be the biggest dark web market place, then it got shutdown. Only a few weeks later Silk Road 2.0 sprung up. This was then succeeded by AlphaBay and Hansa.”