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

A devoted group of FBI agents, intelligence analysts, mega market darknet and help personnel labored alongside home and international law enforcement partners to shut down the positioning and stop the flow of unlawful goods. "AlphaBay was really a world site," mentioned Special Agent Nicholas Phirippidis, one of the FBI investigators who worked on the case from the FBI’s Sacramento Division. "Vendors had been shipping illegal objects from locations all over the world to places everywhere in the world."

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

AlphaBay reported that it serviced more than 200,000 users and 40,000 vendors. Around the time of the takedown, the site had more than 250,000 listings for illegal medicine and toxic chemicals, and greater than 100,000 listings for stolen and fraudulent identification documents, counterfeit items, malware and other laptop hacking instruments, firearms, and fraudulent companies. By comparability, the Silk Road dark market-the most important such enterprise of its type before it was shut down in 2013-had roughly 14,000 listings.