Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency by Andy Greenberg

Author:Andy Greenberg [Greenberg, Andy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2022-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

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For their first day acting as Hansa’s bosses, the team had cautiously watched the site’s internal clockwork, almost in disbelief that they’d gotten away with their takeover undetected. But when it was clear they could control Hansa seemingly indefinitely, they settled in, working in shifts to run the site from the small conference room in Driebergen they’d turned into a kind of twenty-four-hour war room.

On one wall, they set up a sixty-five-inch screen where someone started a stopwatch, measuring exactly how long they’d been in control of the market. Then slowly, silently, they began to spring the trap they’d assembled.

Hansa, like any good dark web drug market, had been designed to learn as little as possible about its users beyond what was necessary to facilitate reliable drug transactions. The passwords for users’ accounts were stored only as cryptographic “hashes,” indecipherable strings of characters that let the site avoid having to protect a collection of those sensitive log-in credentials. Hansa also offered to let users automatically encrypt all their messages using PGP—including, most important, the mailing addresses that buyers would share with sellers when they made an order. All of that meant that, in theory, the site itself would never have full access to its users’ accounts or know their most personal secrets, such as the locations of their homes.

Now the police began to invisibly sabotage those safeguards. They started recording all of Hansa’s usernames and passwords when buyers and sellers logged in. They also began secretly archiving the full text of every message users sent on the site before the text was encrypted. Soon they were collecting hundreds, then thousands of buyers’ addresses from orders, turning the business of the entire market into a glass aquarium under their real-time surveillance.

According to Dutch law, the police had to record and attempt to intercept every drug order made on the market while they controlled it. So the half dozen undercover agents working in their small conference room were soon joined by dozens of others, working on the same floor, who were tasked with manually cataloging every single purchase. They forwarded the data for sales destined for the Netherlands to Dutch police, who could seize the packages of heroin, cocaine, and meth shipped through domestic mail. Non-Dutch orders would be sent to Europol, which was charged with distributing the ever-growing pile of drug deal data to their respective nations’ law enforcement agencies.

Already, the Dutch police had accomplished something that law enforcement had never attempted before: hunting, capturing, and vivisecting a dark web drug market in real time, unbeknownst to the site’s users. But Operation Bayonet was only getting started. The Dutch—and their collaborators from Sacramento to Bangkok—still had other, bigger game in their crosshairs.

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