Police Sell Drugs, Weapons Online

International law enforcement operated Dark Web marketplace Hansa for one month

William O. Pate II
Jul 21, 2017 · 2 min read

Police allowed the buying and selling of illegal drugs and weapons to continue for over a month while in control of one of the Dark Web’s largest marketplaces for illicit goods.

According to a statement by Europol, Dutch police seized Dark Web market Hansa’s servers a month prior to their shutdown yesterday morning.

Europol and partner agencies in those countries supported the Dutch National Police to take over the Hansa marketplace on 20 June 2017 under Dutch judicial authorisation, facilitating the covert monitoring of criminal activities on the platform until it was shut down today, 20 July 2017. In the past few weeks, the Dutch Police collected valuable information on high value targets and delivery addresses for a large number of orders. Some 10 000 foreign addresses of Hansa market buyers were passed on to Europol.

. . .

This involved taking covert control of Hansa under Dutch judicial authority a month ago, which allowed Dutch police to monitor the activity of users without their knowledge, and then shutting down AlphaBay during the same period. It meant the Dutch police could identify and disrupt the regular criminal activity on Hansa but then also sweep up all those new users displaced from AlphaBay who were looking for a new trading platform. In fact they flocked to Hansa in their droves, with an eight-fold increase in the number of new members of Hansa recorded immediately following the shutdown of AlphaBay.

They allowed the buying and selling of illicit items, including deadly drugs like fentanyl, to continue while they collected information on users. Much of such information will likely be encrypted and useless to investigators.

While this is standard police procedure and won’t pose an obstacle to criminal court proceedings, it does raise questions regarding the morality of law enforcement agencies.

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William O. Pate II

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Writer | Critic | Essayist | Public Policy | Marketing in Austin, Texas.

San Antonio Review

News, opinion, fiction, nonfiction, poetry and more.

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