The DOJ says the number of people arrested was a record

DEA Effort to Stop Fentanyl and Opiate Sales on the Dark Web, and in the United States, Europe, and South America

The Department of Justice said it had made a record number of arrests and seizures in an effort to curb fentanyl and opiate sales on the dark web.

The operation started in October of 2020 and covered the US, Europe, and South America. Across the U.S. and eight other countries, authorities arrested 288 people. They seized drugs, firearms, and cash worth more than 50 million dollars.

“Our message to criminals on the dark web is this: You can try to hide in the furthest reaches of the internet, but the Justice Department will find you and hold you accountable for your crimes,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said at a press conference Tuesday.

In the late 2000s, the US law enforcement focused their efforts on shutting down the dark web black market for drugs and sending their dealers and buyers to the next largest online bazaar. Now, one sprawling set of worldwide takedowns has revealed how those investigators are casting a much wider dragnet—one that doesn’t merely target dark web administrators, but also mines their databases for leads to relentlessly trace and arrest hundreds of dealers from those markets around the world.

The operation involved other agencies such as the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration and 30 U.S. attorneys’ offices.

The U.S. alone had nearly 200 people arrested. Authorities seized 104 illegal guns and over 200,000 pills, including ones containing fentanyl, the DOJ said.

The DOJ said last month that the Mexico’s largest drug organization was responsible for thousands of Americans being killed every year by the powerful drug Fentanyl.

“It’s indeed likely that the arrests are related to data from all the different takedowns,” says one former law enforcement official involved in dark web busts, who asked not to be named. Law enforcement combines all the information from different data sets in order to identify high- value targets. If you identify a wallet address, you can link activities on the various markets together to find what you are looking for. The recent busts of dark web markets like Hansa, AlphaBay, and Wall Street Market yielded many new leads after obtaining that sort of historical database.