The direct ripple results of that explosion of incriminating information, handed via so many establishments’ information, aren’t simple to trace. But over the next years, Grant Rabenn, who served as custodian of the recordsdata the Justice Department had assembled from Operation Bayonet, says he obtained requests for that info as a part of dozens of circumstances that businesses throughout the United States had been nonetheless pursuing.

A collection of huge, high-profile dark-web busts would observe. These operations had been all carried out by a brand new group generally known as JCODE, or Joint Criminal Opioid and Darknet Enforcement, pulling collectively brokers from the FBI, DEA, Department of Homeland Security, US Postal Inspection Service, and half a dozen different federal businesses: in 2018, Operation Disarray; in 2019, Operation SaboTor; in 2020, Operation DisrupTor. In complete, in keeping with the FBI, these enforcement campaigns would finally lead to greater than 240 arrests, 160 “knock and talks,” and the seizure of greater than 1,700 kilos of medication, together with $13.5 million in money and cryptocurrency.

But the Hansa aspect of the operation was not with out prices. Aside from the huge manpower and assets Operation Bayonet had required, it had demanded {that a} group of Dutch police develop into dark-web kingpins. For almost a month, they’d facilitated the sale of untold portions of lethal narcotics to unknown consumers the world over. Even as they compromised Hansa, Hansa had compromised them too.

Did the Dutch police really feel that sense of taint—taint that maybe comes with any undercover work? Some, no less than, describe feeling surprisingly unconflicted about their position. “To be honest, it was exciting, mostly,” mentioned the staff lead, Petra Haandrikman. Dutch prosecutors had, in spite of everything, already reviewed the case, weighed its ethics, and given them the inexperienced gentle. After that, the police concerned felt they may push the operation so far as doable with a clear conscience.

The Dutch police identified that they did ban the particularly lethal opiate fentanyl from Hansa whereas it was beneath their management, in an effort to reduce the hurt they could be liable for—a transfer Hansa’s customers really applauded. In fact, nonetheless, that ban had come only a few days earlier than the tip of their undercover operation. Until then, for greater than three weeks, that extremely harmful opioid had continued to be supplied on the positioning, with no assure that every one of its orders can be intercepted.

And how did the police really feel concerning the determination to supervise these narcotics gross sales moderately than shut Hansa down and stop the transactions altogether?

“They would have taken place anyway,” Gert Ras mentioned with out hesitation, “but on a different market.”

In the years since, the darkish net’s observers have tried to find out to what extent Operation Bayonet really disrupted that infinite interchangeability of markets, the fixed cycle of raid, rebuild, and repeat. Could the extremely coordinated international takedown of AlphaBay—or the rest—finish and even sluggish the everlasting shell recreation legislation enforcement businesses had by then been enjoying for years, with a brand new market continuously prepared to soak up the customers of the final?

One examine, no less than, steered that the AlphaBay and Hansa busts had extra lasting results than earlier dark-web takedowns. The Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research, which matches by the acronym TNO, discovered that when different markets had been seized, just like the Silk Road or Silk Road 2, most of their drug distributors quickly confirmed up on different dark-web drug websites. But the distributors who fled Hansa after Bayonet’s one-two punch did not reappear, or in the event that they did, they’d been compelled to wash their identities and reputations, re-creating themselves from scratch. “Compared to both the Silk Road takedowns, or even the AlphaBay takedown, the Hansa Market shutdown stands out in a positive way,” the TNO report learn. “We see the first signs of game-changing police intervention.”