Federal prosecutors and law enforcement agencies announced the takedown of AlphaBay and Hansa Market during a Department of Justice press conference. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Deputy Attorney Ge
Federal prosecutors and law enforcement agencies announced the takedown of AlphaBay and Hansa Market during a Department of Justice press conference. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, and officials from multiple agencies detailed how law enforcement in Thailand, the Netherlands, Lithuania, Canada, the United Kingdom, and France coordinated the international operation to shut down the two largest darknet marketplaces.
President Donald Trump directed the Department of Justice to target internet criminal networks operating overseas. Sessions outlined the directive: "One is to dismantle internet transnational criminal organizations. That is what we are announcing today. Dismantling of the largest dark website in the world by far."
Sessions' opening remarks centered on the opioid crisis gripping the country. He cited stark statistics: an American dies of a drug overdose every eleven minutes, and two million Americans are addicted to prescription drugs. The attorney general pointed to AlphaBay as a source of these deaths. "We know of several Americans who were killed by drugs on AlphaBay," Sessions said, and he recounted two specific cases. An eighteen-year-old girl and a thirteen-year-old boy both died after using synthetic opioids purchased from vendors operating on the marketplace.
The scale of AlphaBay exceeded previous darknet operations. The marketplace operated with 40,000 vendors, 200,000 customers, and 250,000 listings. FBI Acting Director Andrew McCabe put this in context: AlphaBay was ten times larger than the original Silk Road, which federal agents shut down in 2013. Among the vendors, 122 offered fentanyl for sale and 238 offered heroin. Sessions summed up the marketplace's primary function: "By far, most of this activity on AlphaBay was in illegal drugs, pouring fuel on the fire of a national drug epidemic."
During the briefing, law enforcement officials tempered expectations about the impact of the takedown. McCabe acknowledged that dismantling one marketplace does not end the problem. "Critics will say as we shudder one darknet market, another will emerge. And they may be right. But that is the nature of criminal work. It never goes away. You have to constantly keep at it, and you have to use every tool in your toolbox."
Robert Patterson, the DEA's acting deputy administrator, voiced similar caution: "We are keenly aware there will be another AlphaBay." But Sessions expressed confidence in the value of the operation. "I believe that because of this operation, the American people are safer. People around the world are safer," he said.
