The US Department of Justice’s Joint Criminal Opioid and Darknet Enforcement (JCODE) Operation SpecTor
The Department of Justice announced Tuesday it’s made a record number of arrests and seizures in a coordinated international effort to target fentanyl and opioid sales on the dark web.
Today, the US Department of Justice, Europol, and a list of law enforcement agencies in at least nine countries from Brazil to Poland revealed Operation SpecTor, a collection of dark web investigations that led to the arrest of 288 people worldwide—153 of whom were in the US. Drugs, cash, and cryptocurrencies amounting to over 1 ton, as well as over 120 firearms, were seized. Europol simultaneously revealed that German police had taken down the dark web site Monopoly Market, which had gone offline in late 2021 under mysterious circumstances, leaving many of its users to wonder if the market’s administrators had pulled an “exit scam” in which they absconded with users’ funds.
The Attorney General said that theJustice Department would hold offenders accountable for their crimes if they tried to hide on the dark web.
A decade ago, the US law enforcement didn’t care about the dark web black market for drugs but about sending dealers and buyers scrambling to the next big anonymous 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, which was led by the department’s Joint Criminal Opioid and Darknet Enforcement (JCODE) team, involved other agencies such as the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and 30 U.S. attorneys’ offices.
In the U.S. alone, 153 people were arrested. Authorities seized 104 illegal guns and over 200,000 pills, including ones containing fentanyl, the DOJ said.
The Mexican drug organization which the Department of Justice says is responsible for killing tens of thousands of Americans each year was identified last month.
A former law enforcement official who was involved in some dark web busts said the arrests were probably related to data from all the different takedowns. Law enforcement combine the information from the different seized data sets to identify high-value targets. There is a chance that the different markets can link activities if you identify the wallet address of the scurvy. In previous busts of dark web markets in recent years—including AlphaBay, Hansa, Wall Street Market, and Dark Market—agents obtained that sort of historical database in each case, cracking open a wealth of new leads.