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posted by martyb on Friday July 21 2017, @07:33AM   Printer-friendly
from the what's-next? dept.

An international investigation has taken down two dark web marketplaces:

Two of the largest dark web marketplaces have been shut down following a "landmark" international law enforcement investigation.

The AlphaBay and Hansa sites had been associated with the trade in illicit items such as drugs, weapons, malware and stolen data.

According to Europol, there were more than 250,000 listings for illegal drugs and toxic chemicals on AlphaBay.

Hansa was seized and covertly monitored for a month before being deactivated.

The agency said it believed the bust would lead to hundreds of new investigations in Europe.

"The capability of drug traffickers and other serious criminals around the world has taken a serious hit today," said Europol's executive director Rob Wainwright.


[Ed. addition] The US Department Of Justice announcement goes into considerable detail about the size of the site and the products carried there, as well as the agencies around the world which assisted with the takedown.

Further, Ars Technica UK explains the critical opsec mistake that lead to the takedown:

Federal officials confirmed the recent death of Alexandre Cazes, whom they said was the Thailand-based Canadian mastermind behind AlphaBay, and announced that civil forfeiture actions had also begun. That documents say that as of June 2017, AlphaBay had over 369,000 listings.

Authorities also distributed a criminal indictment against Cazes from the Eastern District of California on numerous conspiracy and drug trafficking charges.

[...] The civil forfeiture complaint outlines a crucial operational security mistake that Cazes made when he began the site in 2014. When new users signed up, they received an e-mail from AlphaBay welcoming them to the site.

"The e-mail address of "pimp_alex_91@hotmail.com" was included in the header information of the AlphaBay welcome e-mail," the court filing continues.

This e-mail address was also included in the header of AlphaBay users who lost their passwords.

Canadian authorities were able to determine that that Hotmail account was registered to a man named Alexandre Cazes with a birthdate of October 19, 1991—hence the "91." They further confirmed this e-mail address under the "Alpha02" handle (the same handle used by the head of AlphaBay) in a French language online tech forum, which included Cazes' name and his "pimp_alex_91" e-mail address.


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  • (Score: 4, Touché) by lx on Friday July 21 2017, @07:59AM

    by lx (1915) on Friday July 21 2017, @07:59AM (#542264)

    Dutch police have been running Hansa over the past month. In defending this action they sound like the Piratebay founders:

    "We didn't really trade in drugs, we only ran the platform" I'm guessing the original operators of Hansa and Alphabay will be using the same defense.

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