AlphaBay
AlphaBay was a darknet marketplace that operated from December 2014 until July 2017, when it was seized in Operation Bayonet. A relaunched version appeared in August 2021 and closed in 2023.
AlphaBay was a darknet marketplace that operated as a Tor onion service from December 2014 until it was seized by a United States-led international task force on 5 July 2017. The seizure was the headline component of Operation Bayonet. At the time of its closure AlphaBay had an estimated 400,000 registered users and over 350,000 product listings, roughly ten times the size of Silk Road at its peak. [1]
Background
AlphaBay was founded by Alexandre Cazes, a Canadian citizen then resident in Thailand, under the pseudonym Alpha02. The market opened in December 2014, several months after the closure of Silk Road 2.0, and offered a modern interface with built-in PGP support, 2-of-3 Bitcoin multisig and later Monero and Ethereum escrow.
Growth and peak
After the voluntary closure of Agora in September 2015 AlphaBay inherited much of the English-language user base. By mid-2017 it was estimated to be processing between US$600,000 and US$800,000 in sales per day. Research by the RAND Corporation and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime cited AlphaBay as the then-largest marketplace of its kind in the Western world.
July 2017 takedown
Operation Bayonet, led by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and Drug Enforcement Administration with support from Europol, the Royal Thai Police and the Dutch National Police, saw AlphaBay servers in Lithuania, Canada and the Netherlands seized on 5 July 2017. Cazes was arrested in Bangkok the same day. The Dutch National Police simultaneously assumed control of the smaller Hansa marketplace and operated it covertly for about four weeks, collecting intelligence on users who migrated from AlphaBay.
Death of Alexandre Cazes
Cazes was found dead in his cell at the Narcotics Suppression Bureau detention centre in Bangkok on 12 July 2017, one week after his arrest. Thai authorities ruled the death a suicide; family members disputed the finding. Thai prosecutors seized assets valued at roughly US$23 million, including real estate in Thailand and Cyprus, vehicles and cryptocurrency wallets.
2021 relaunch
In August 2021 a new onion service identifying itself as AlphaBay opened. The operator, posting under the handle DeSnake, claimed to have been AlphaBay’s original security officer. The relaunch was Monero-only, used v3 onion addresses and introduced a published list of banned categories including firearms, fentanyl and services targeting unaffiliated individuals. The project remained small compared with the original and had become inactive by early 2023.
References
- U.S. Department of Justice (20 July 2017). AlphaBay, the Largest Online “Dark Market,” Shut Down.
- Europol (20 July 2017). Massive blow to criminal Dark Web activities after globally coordinated operation.
- Greenberg, Andy (2022). Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency. Doubleday.