It's finally confirmed — In a coordinated International operation, Europol along with FBI, DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency) and Dutch National Police have seized and taken down AlphaBay, one of the largest criminal marketplaces on the Dark Web.
But not just AlphaBay, the law enforcement agencies have also seized another illegal dark web market called HANSA, Europol confirmed in a press release today.
On July 4th, AlphaBay suddenly went down without any explanation from its administrators, which left its customers in panic. Some of them even suspected that the website's admins had pulled an exit scam and stole user funds.
However, last week it was reported that the mysterious shut down of the dark web marketplace was due to a series of raids conducted by the international authorities.
The raid also resulted in the arrest of Alexandre Cazes, a 26-year-old Canadian citizen who was one of the alleged AlphaBay's operators and was awaiting extradition to the US when a guard found him hanged in his jail cell the next day.
Now, Europol just announced that two of the largest criminal Dark Web markets—AlphaBay and Hansa— have shut down by the authorities, as the infrastructure "responsible for the trading of over 350 000 illicit commodities including drugs, firearms and cybercrime malware."
For the rest of the article go https://thehackernews.com/2017/07/alphabay-hansa-darkweb-markets-seized.html?m=1
I personally think this is a good thing but there will always be another silk road/alpha bay. What do you think? Do you think the users being monitored by the feds for a month is right? They were doing illegal activities on a dark website after all.