"This was a landmark operation," mentioned FBI Acting Director Andrew McCabe during a press convention on the Department of Justice to announce the results of mega darknet the case. "We’re talking about multiple servers in numerous nations, hundreds of tens of millions in cryptocurrency, and a Darknet drug commerce that spanned the globe."

A dedicated team of FBI brokers, intelligence analysts, and help personnel labored alongside domestic and international regulation enforcement partners to shut down the positioning and cease the movement of unlawful goods. "AlphaBay was actually a world site," said Special Agent Nicholas Phirippidis, one of many FBI investigators who worked on the case from the FBI’s Sacramento Division. "Vendors have been delivery unlawful gadgets from places all around the world to locations all around the world."

The web site, an outgrowth of earlier darkish market websites like Silk Road-but a lot larger-went online in December 2014. It took about six months for the underground market to select up momentum, Phirippidis mentioned, "but after that it grew exponentially."

AlphaBay reported that it serviced more than 200,000 users and 40,000 vendors. Across the time of the takedown, the positioning had greater than 250,000 listings for unlawful medication and toxic chemicals, and greater than 100,000 listings for stolen and fraudulent identification paperwork, counterfeit goods, malware and different pc hacking tools, firearms, and fraudulent companies. By comparability, the Silk Road darkish market-the largest such enterprise of its form before it was shut down in 2013-had approximately 14,000 listings.