Why just one month?

Been reading a lot of news about the AB and Hansa takedowns. "Landmark case", glorious victory and such. Now, I just can't stop wondering why they only continued to operate Hansa for one month. Why not do this for as long as they could, remaining undetected.

LE could have potentially recorded hundreds of thousands of addresses instead of a mere 10k, and with much better accuracy (no matter how good your OPSEC, people make mistakes every once in a while, even the best of us). They could get way more intel on the vendors, identify the largest ones - you know, the ones they're really after. LE could have owned this space and everyone in it, for a much bigger prize than one-off news headlines and a few big arrests.

Why not?


Comments


[32 Points] None:

Handling disputes was too much effort


[4 Points] None:

[deleted]


[3 Points] seventhaccount7:

I think there was still moderators and possibly other top level players in Hansa who were not LE. The longer they ran the market the longer they gave the other higher ups to notice that something was wrong and inform the users. If you noticed, a few hours before Hansa got shutdown there was a message on the site saying that they had reason to believe that there was currently an infiltration.


[1 Points] mymuse100:

30-60 days