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?????????????????????????????????????????????????Monday, July 24, 2017
FBI Announces Huge Darknet Takedown
FBI Acting Director Andrew McCabe, flanked by Attorney General Jeff
Sessions (right) and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, announce
the takedown of the criminal website AlphaBay, the largest Darknet
marketplace in the world, at July 20 press conference in Washington, D.C
Authorities Shutter Online Criminal Market AlphaBay
Jul-22-2017
(WASHINGTON, D.C.) - The largest marketplace on the Darknet—where
hundreds of thousands of criminals anonymously bought and sold drugs,
weapons, hacking tools, stolen identities, and a host of other illegal
goods and services—has been shut down as a result of one the most
sophisticated and coordinated efforts to date on the part of law
enforcement across the globe.
In early July, multiple computer servers used by the AlphaBay website
were seized worldwide, and the site’s creator and administrator—a
25-year-old Canadian citizen living in Thailand—was arrested.
AlphaBay operated for more than two years and had transactions exceeding $1 billion in Bitcoin and other digital currencies.
The site, which operated on the anonymous Tor network, was a major
source of heroin and fentanyl, and sales originating from AlphaBay have
been linked to multiple overdose deaths in the United States.
“This was a landmark operation,” said FBI Acting Director Andrew McCabe
during a press conference at the Department of Justice to announce the
results of the case.
“We’re talking about multiple servers in different countries, hundreds
of millions in cryptocurrency, and a Darknet drug trade that spanned the
globe.”
A dedicated team of FBI agents, intelligence analysts, and support
personnel worked alongside domestic and international law enforcement
partners to shut down the site and stop the flow of illegal goods.
“AlphaBay was truly a global site,” said Special Agent Nicholas
Phirippidis, one of the FBI investigators who worked on the case from
the FBI’s Sacramento Division.
“Vendors were shipping illegal items from places all over the world to places all over the world.”
The website, an outgrowth of earlier dark market sites like Silk
Road—but much larger—went online in December 2014. It took about six
months for the underground marketplace to pick up momentum, Phirippidis
said, “but after that it grew exponentially.”
AlphaBay reported that it serviced more than 200,000 users and 40,000
vendors. Around the time of takedown, the site had more than 250,000
listings for illegal drugs and toxic chemicals, and more than 100,000
listings for stolen and fraudulent identification documents, counterfeit
goods, malware and other computer hacking tools, firearms, and
fraudulent services. By comparison, the Silk Road dark market—the
largest such enterprise of its kind before it was shut down in 2013—had
approximately 14,000 listings.
The operation to seize AlphaBay’s servers was led by the FBI and
involved the cooperative efforts of law enforcement agencies in
Thailand, the Netherlands, Lithuania, Canada, the United Kingdom, and
France, along with the European law enforcement agency Europol.
“Conservatively, several hundred investigations across the globe were
being conducted at the same time as a result of AlphaBay’s illegal
activities,” Phirippidis said.
“It really took an all-hands effort among law enforcement worldwide to deconflict and protect those ongoing investigations.”
U.S. law enforcement also worked with numerous foreign partners to
freeze and preserve millions of dollars in cryptocurrency representing
the proceeds of AlphaBay’s illegal activities. Those funds will be the
subject of forfeiture actions.
AlphaBay’s creator and administrator, Alexandre Cazes—who went by the
names Alpha02 and Admin online—was arrested by Thai authorities on
behalf of the U.S. on July 5, 2017. A week later, Cazes apparently took
his own life while in custody in Thailand.
Because AlphaBay operated on the anonymous Tor network, administrators
were confident they could hide the locations of the site’s servers and
the identities of users.
“They understood that law enforcement was monitoring their activity,”
said FBI Special Agent Chris Thomas, “but they felt so protected by the
dark web technology that they thought they could get away with their
crimes.”
The FBI and its partners used a combination of traditional investigative
techniques along with sophisticated new tools to break the case and
dismantle AlphaBay.
“The message to criminals,” is: Don’t think that you are safe because
you’re on the dark web. There are no corners of the dark web where you
can hide,” Thomas said.
The operation to seize AlphaBay coincided with efforts by Dutch law
enforcement to shut down the Hansa Market, another prominent Darknet
marketplace that was used to facilitate the sale of illegal drugs,
malware, and other illegal services.
After AlphaBay’s shutdown, criminal users and vendors flocked to Hansa
Market, where they believed their identities would be masked.
“Taking down two major dark sites at once is considerable, and it took a
lot of effort, a lot of expertise and teamwork,” said FBI Acting
Director McCabe. “As this level of teamwork and coordination shows, we
will go to the ends of the earth to find these people and to stop them.”
_________________________________________
Global Threat Requires Global Partnerships
The takedown of AlphaBay—and another prominent site on the Darknet known as Hansa Market—required months of planning among law enforcement agencies around the world and was one of the most sophisticated coordinated takedowns to date in the fight against online criminal activity.
The operation to seize AlphaBay’s servers and shut down the site was led
by the FBI and involved the cooperative efforts of law enforcement
authorities in Thailand, the Netherlands, Lithuania, Canada, the United
Kingdom, and France, along with the European law enforcement agency
Europol.
It is expected that hundreds of new investigations will be generated worldwide as a result of the takedowns.
Europol played a central coordinating role in both cases. In early July,
days before AlphaBay servers were seized, Europol hosted a command post
staffed with representatives from the FBI, the Drug Enforcement
Administration, and the Department of Justice, along with its own
members. The command post was the central hub for information exchange
during the AlphaBay operation.
In parallel to these operations, Europol hosted an international
Cyberpatrol Action Week in June, where more than 40 investigators from
22 European Union member states and representatives from the FBI and
other U.S. law enforcement agencies joined in an intelligence-gathering
exercise to map out criminality on the Darknet.
The focus was on vendors and buyers who were actively involved in the
online trade of illegal commodities including drugs, weapons and
explosives, forged documents, and cyber crime tools. Analysis of the
results and dissemination of the resultant intelligence is ongoing.