Exclusive: Dutch Cops on Alpha Bay ‘Refugees’
Summary: Dutch police took over the Hansa dark web market on June 20, 2017, gaining physical access to its servers in Lithuania and running a real-time copy of the site from servers in the Netherlands while the original stayed online. When U.S. authorities shuttered AlphaBay on July 5, a rush of "AlphaBay refugees" moved to Hansa, and police closed new registrations for a few days to keep up with the orders.
Bottom line: The FBI wanted AlphaBay's closure to look like an exit scam so users would lose trust and feel unsafe on any dark market, and the Dutch team's operation turned that migration into a funnel straight into law enforcement. AlphaBay alone had some 40,000 vendors and more than 200,000 customers, with 238 vendors selling heroin and 122 advertising Fentanyl.
Read the original at Krebs on Security ↗
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