German Police Just Made a Gigantic Dark-Web Drug Bust

If anyone had forgotten the sheer scale of the dark-web drug trade, German police just offered a helpful reminder. They’ve seized more than a third of a ton of narcotics from a single online drug seller—a haul that, despite its size, represents an insignificant dent in the burgeoning digital narcotics market known as Evolution.

Yesterday police in Leipzig announced that they raided 38 locations and arrested seven people across Germany associated with an online drug operation known to its online customers only as “Shiny-Flakes.” The bust began with the arrest of a 20-year-old Leipzig man in late February accused of leading the operation, German police say, along with a 51-year-old Bulgarian man who reportedly acted as the group’s courier from a supplier in Holland. In total, the police say they’ve seized cocaine, ecstasy, LSD, hash, marijuana, amphetamines and methamphetamines totaling up to over 700 pounds of illegal drugs. The group sold those products on the stealthy drug market Evolution, which has emerged over the last year as the top dark web black market, as well as on its own independent websites. Combined with an additional 100 pounds cops bought from the dealers as part of their investigation, police report they’ve taken close to $4.25 million worth of drugs from the group.

The blog Deep Dot Web, which closely tracks the online narcotics trade, calls the law enforcement operation the biggest Dark Web drug bust ever, though German police would only confirm that it’s the largest such bust to ever take place in Germany.

The investigation, according to Leipzig police spokesperson Katharina Geyer, began nearly a year ago, and more arrests may still be in the works. “Our observation started in March 2014, and from this day on, we got more and more information about the dark net and Shiny-Flakes,” Geyer says. “The search of the [front man’s] room was the height of the investigation…it’s still going on.”

Police have seized control of two sites that Shiny-Flakes ran independently—one as a hidden service running on the Tor anonymity network, and another on the unprotected Internet. But Shiny-Flakes was also a well-known vendor on Evolution, the Dark Web drug market that has recently become the successor to the defunct Silk Road as the most popular market for anonymous drug sales online. In an October post to the Evolution user forums, Shiny-Flakes advertised that it sold all the drugs that police later seized from the group and many more, including Ketamine, Diazepam, Midazolam, Tramadol, Bromazepam and others. It promised that it would soon be offering new products including heroin, testosterone, and fentanyl, a powerful painkiller sometimes used an alternative to heroin.

Polizei Sachsen Geyer, the Leipzig police spokesperson, wouldn’t reveal the names of the suspects yet or provide any information about the investigation. But a drug operation as large as Shiny-Flakes’ would have multiple points of attack for law enforcement, from its suppliers to the website it ran without the protection of Tor.

On Evolution’s forums, users have been asking for weeks about Shiny-Flakes’ disappearance. News of his bust caused panic among some buyers; They worried the group may have kept information on its customers that police could use for further arrests.”People say Shiny had an EXCEL document with all the orders and addresses, nothing encrypted,” wrote one Evolution user named Jawz. “Guys please clean your houses and don’t believe that myth that the cops will only search houses of big customers.”

But despite the coup the Shiny-Flakes arrests and seizures represent for law enforcement, it’s worth noting that the group accounts for only a small fraction of a single market in the still-flourishing Dark Web drug economy. Evolution alone has nearly 20,000 drug listings, and a quick browse through the site shows dozens of vendors selling the same products that Shiny-Flakes offered, as well as weapons and stolen credit card information.

Even Operation Onymous, a massive operation that took down dozens of Dark Web drug sites including several popular markets last November, hasn’t stopped the growth of that illicit underground. Eight hundred pounds of narcotics on a table make for a powerful photo op. But tomorrow, the Dark Web’s black markets will go on with business as usual.