Source: https://www.bnr.nl/player/audio/10064595/10326740
I made a translation for our English users with some information about this operation. Sorry if i made some mistakes but translating is not my best trade:
Translated summary:
The police had control over Hansa for about 27 days and they had insight for in about 1000 transactions per day. They cooperated with the police from Germany, Lithuania, FBI and Europol. They got a tip that the market was hosted in the Netherlands as they searched they found a server with remains of the market. The server there was migrated to a different country. After investigations they found that the server was live in Lithuania.
After this investigation they (the police) arrested two persons in Germany. At the same time they made a copy from Hansamarket in Lithuania and the technical experts from the police migrated that copy to the Netherlands. The police had now full control over the market and could basically see everything on the market. Quote: "We could see disable the encryption for PMs so we could read them, our people needed to act like the admins that were there before and we investigated the site how they behaved so we could copy that"
<talks about profiling of the admins>
Interviewer asks if the police sold drugs when the site was under their control
We first tried to identify the people buying and selling because they first saw only the nicknames. After this we could identify the network was globally, hence the involvement of Europol.
After the identification we seized a few transportations of drugs and mostly bigger transportations (50 pills or more). Interviewer asks if it was business as usual under their control: For the customers, it was really business as usual but what they didn't saw that we froze the money. The sellers and customers thought they were trading with each other but in the mean time we sent the money to the wallet of the Public Prosecution Service. It really looked like business as usual but in the background there were really different processes working.
Interviewer asks again if the police sold drug under their control
Not actively but the platform sold drugs.. more than 1000s of transactions per day and most it was personal use amounts. Interviewer: I understand that drug need to be sold otherwise you can't locate the users of the site Yes, our main goal was to break the anonymity on that website that's why we got that short timeframe to get as much info as we could. But really the goal was to give the message: You guys think that on the darkweb you can trade anonymously but we showed that you could easily trade with the police for 3 weeks.
Interviewer: Why did you quit the operations after 27 days wasn't it better to continue for longer?
We have gathered enough information. The investigation for this closes today but a lot more investigations will start today with the information we gathered with this operation that gave us links to other vendors, marketplaces and more. And as a government it's not a good idea to have a live drugmarket.
Interviewer: There are now a few people arrested, how many do you think will come?
That's difficult to say. In the Netherlands we have around 500 people who bought something from this market. Our goal now is to see what they bought exactly and to profile them. But our main goal is not to make those arrests but the goal is to break the anonymity and let the people know we have their identity
I know there were withdrawl issues over the past few days but they make it sound like they had it set up the whole time to where the money was getting sent to them and not to vendors, am i reading that wrong? because i feel like over the span of a month people would have noticed not getting their money especially since hansa didnt have an onsite wallet to use