Operation Disruptor has led to a wave of arrests and seizures, but the dark web drug market has bounced back before. It’s one of the largest global dark web takedowns to date: 179 arrests spread across six countries; 500 kilograms of drugs seized; $6.5 million in cash and cryptocurrency confiscated. And while it was announced this morning, Operation Disruptor traces its roots back to May 3, 2019.
When the Dutch High Tech Crime Unit took over one of the world’s biggest dark web drug marketplaces, Hansa, they knew they were onto a winner. They were able to monitor anyone who came onto the site and, potentially, start determining their real locations. This week, the Dutch cops claim to have taken out a group of prolific dark web drug pushers who operated on Hansa.
The Dark Web Map is a visualization of 6,608 sites that were present on the dark web during a January 2018 crawl. This is not an exhaustive listing of all onion services, because many onion services are not easy to discover by crawling. Also, you may recall from the previous section that not all onion services are websites.
According to the Tor Project’s statistics, there are over 60,000 onion services running at the time of publication, so our sample represents about 10%.
For anyone who has watched the last few years of cat-and-mouse games on the dark web’s black markets, the pattern is familiar: A contraband bazaar like the Silk Road attracts thousands of drug dealers and their customers, along with intense scrutiny from police and three-letter agencies. Authorities hunt down its administrators, and tear the site offline in a dramatic takedown—only to find that its buyers and sellers have simply migrated to the next dark-web market on their list.