Drug trafficking

Dark Web drug marketplace AlphaBay was shut down by law enforcement

AlphaBay, a Dark Web marketplace for illegal drugs and other underground goods, has been down since early last week. Now, it appears the cause of the shutdown was an international effort from law enforcement that nabbed one of the site’s operators, a Canadian citizen named Alexandre Cazes, while he was in Thailand, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal published yesterday. Thailand authorities cooperated with both the US and Canada to make the arrest, with the US leading the charge on extradition.

AlphaBay was largely considered the largest and most lucrative underground marketplace on the Dark Web, a colloquial shorthand term for the network of sites accessible only through the anonymity-preserving web browser Tor. AlphaBay rose in prominence after the shuttering of the Silk Road in 2013 and arrest of its operator, Ross Ulbricht, who lost his appeal in May and is currently serving a life sentence. Other Dark Web marketplaces are now dealing with the sudden influx of new users, with some temporarily disabling registrations and referring to the eager online drug buyers as AlphaBay “refugees.
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