Police offer a conservative estimate that the criminal marketplaces could have generated more than £1bn during their existence.
AlphaBay, the largest criminal marketplace on the dark web, and Hansa, the third largest, could have generated more than £1bn in revenue while they were open, according to a “conservative estimate” by police.
“This is the largest dark net marketplace takedown in history, ” said US attorney general Jeff Sessions, accusing online dealers of “pouring fuel on the fire of the national drug epidemic” and warning that “the dark net is not a place to hide.”
Identifying dark nets sites is notoriously difficult as they often operate as hidden services, using the free anonymity software Tor to protect their operators’ identities from law enforcement.
Police identified the physical-world location of the Hansa marketplace on 20 June, and have been working covertly for a month to collect information about the marketplace’s users before shutting it down on Thursday.
AlphaBay, which reportedly listed nearly 300,000 items for sale at the time of its disappearance, went down on 3 July.
How the authorities managed to identify the operators and locations of the Hansa site will now prompt widespread speculation, just as it did when Silk Road was shut down in 2013, and its administrator, Ross William Ulbricht, arrested.
The suspected creator and administrator of the AlphaBay marketplace was identified because he had left a personal email address connected to AlphaBay, which users could see in the header metadata of emails sent from the site.
Authorities investigated the address and found it belonged to a man called Alexandre Cazes, a Canadian citizen who was arrested on behalf of the US in Thailand.
Cazes, a computer expert who Thai officials said had lived there for eight years, was described by police as “living a luxury life”.
The 26-year-old was arrested the day after the site disappeared and was reportedly later found hanged in his jail cell in Bangkok.
The suspected administrators of the Hansa marketplace were arrested in Germany and are currently in custody.
