For years, dark web marketplaces and the law enforcement agencies that fight them have been locked in a cycle of raid, rinse, repeat: For every online black market taken down, another has always been there to take its place. But rarely has a dominant dark web marketplace been busted by a massive law enforcement operation, only to rise from the ashes half a decade later and reclaim the top spot—a feat that may very soon be accomplished by AlphaBay, the once and future king of bootleg crypto-economy.
In July 2017 A global law enforcement operation known as Operation Bayonet took down the growing drug and cybercrime marketplace AlphaBay, seizing the site’s central server in Lithuania and arresting its creator, Alexander Kazes, outside his home in Bangkok. Yet last August, AlphaBay’s number two administrator and security specialist, publicly known only as DeSnake, suddenly resurfaced, announcing the resurrection of AlphaBay in a new and improved form. Now, 10 months later, thanks in part to a wave of takedowns and the mysterious disappearance of competing dark web marketplaces, DeSnake’s reincarnated AlphaBay is now on its way to its former heights atop the digital underworld. By some metrics, it looks like he’s already reclaimed that spot.
“Yes, AlphaBay is the #1 marketplace on the darknet right now,” DeSnake told WIRED in a text conversation last week. “I told you we were going to be #1 before,” he added, referring to our interview with AlphaBay’s new admin during its relaunch last summer. “As I told you, I do what I say.”
DeSnake’s boast is at least partially true: As of last week, AlphaBay had more than 30,000 unique product listings — mostly drugs, from ecstasy to opioids to methamphetamines — but also thousands of ads for malware and stolen data, such as Social Security numbers and credit card details. That’s up from just 500 listings last September. Another older marketplace called ASAP displays more than 50,000 listings. But ASAP has been known to allow sellers to post duplicate listings. And according to security firm Flashpoint, which closely monitors competitive markets, AlphaBay had more than 1,300 active vendors in the first six months of this year, compared with about 1,000 for ASAP. According to Flashpoint data, AlphaBay listings also appear to be growing significantly faster.
Meanwhile, other marketplaces advertised on dark web forums like Archetyp and Incognito have only a few thousand or only a few hundred listings. All of this suggests that AlphaBay may already be the most popular marketplace for dark web vendors to list their wares for sale.
AlphaBay’s tens of thousands of product listings are still a fraction of the more than 350,000 it offered before it was taken down in 2017, when it was the largest dark web marketplace ever seen. The FBI estimated it was 10 times the size of the legendary Silk Road drug market. DeSnake admits that the new AlphaBay’s revenue is still nowhere near its peak in 2017, when blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis estimated that AlphaBay generated as much as $2 million a day in sales. (DeSnake declined to share current sales numbers, but said they are “in the high numbers.”)
