Nearly 300 Arrested in ‘Dark Web’ Fentanyl Crackdown

A focus of the effort was the potent synthetic opioid fentanyl. The drug’s inexpensive, easy-to-replicate formula has boosted its appeal among criminal networks, fueling a U.S. drug-overdose crisis that claimed a record 106,700 lives in the U.S. in 2021.

The bust was the latest of its kind by U.S. and allied law-enforcement agencies, which have for several years sought, with limited success, to shut down darknet forums to curb the rash of drug trafficking, ransomware attacks and other criminal activity.

Security experts have observed criminals quickly finding another marketplace shortly after one goes under. The October 2013 seizure of Silk Road was considered a watershed operation at the time, but criminals soon found a similar option in the AlphaBay marketplace until it, too, was knocked offline in a law-enforcement operation in 2017.

Mr. Garland acknowledged that criminals are often able to reconstitute quickly but said that the expanding law-enforcement pressure was making it harder for replacement marketplaces to spin up. 

“There is a bit of a whac-a-mole problem here, and we are whacking as hard as we can,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said. “We do believe it is having an impact.”

The Justice Department’s operation was coordinated with other agencies including Europol, which said it seized “Monopoly Market,” a marketplace operating on the Dark Web, a network of websites that uses anonymity software to hide users’ locations. Customers on darknet forums use cryptocurrency to pay for illegal goods such as drugs, or services such as malware for cyberattacks, making it sometimes difficult for investigators to track them down.

The investigation began in October 2021 and resulted in 153 arrests in the U.S., the Justice Department said, including that of a California man who allegedly used at least nine different marketplaces and employed a network of workers to ship millions of pills laced with fentanyl and methamphetamine to darknet buyers.

For the first time this year, the Federal Bureau of Investigation began reaching out to darknet narcotics buyers “to let them know that their actions were not anonymous and to warn them about the perils of the purchases they made,” FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate said, as dealers increasingly cut their product with potentially deadly doses of fentanyl.

The pace of takedowns has intensified. Last year, for example, U.S. and German partners shut down Hydra Market, which officials described at the time as one of the world’s largest darknet marketplaces, accounting for 80% of all darknet-related crypto transactions. Hydra was said to mainly serve Russian-speaking countries, as have some other seized marketplaces.

Darknet seizures are part of a broader Biden administration strategy to curtail crypto-fueled crime, one that has also included sanctioning a number of crypto exchanges, also largely operated in Russia, such as Suex OTC, which was accused of helping to launder ransomware payments.

Increasingly, investigators have been able to link cryptocurrency use to criminals, challenging the notion that bitcoin and similar products provide anonymity.  

The Justice Department has increasingly focused more resources on crypto-supported crime since bitcoin and other currencies have become more appealing to criminals, as they have exploded in both value and popularity over the past decade.

Write to Sadie Gurman at [email protected] and Dustin Volz at [email protected]