Who Is the Joint Criminal Opioid Darknet Enforcement Team (J-CODE)?
The infamous Silk Road was an online black market and the first modern dark net market the world had ever seen. It was best known as an online platform to buy and sell illegal drugs using untraceable cryptocurrency like bitcoin. Since Silk Road was taken down in 2013, and its founder, Ross Ulbricht, imprisoned for life, an increasing number of copycat sites have appeared. Two of the Silk Road’s biggest successors, AlphaBay and Hansa have reportedly as much as five times the traffic as Silk Road had at its peak. When AlphaBay was taken down by the FBI in 2017, it was estimated that in their two-year existence, AlphaBay had over $1 billion in transactions on their site. In 2016, Hansa was taken down in a different way. Dutch investigators actually took over operations of Hansa and allowed it to operate for over a month, catching a litany of users and harming the trust that users had for dark web transactions. In 2019, Dutch police also shut down a dark web page that offered “Bitcoin Laundering” which made it harder for police to track Bitcoin transactions. Even through tough law enforcement efforts, the market for illegal drugs on the dark web continues to grow in scale.
FEDERAL EFFORTS AGAINST ILLEGAL DRUGS SOLD ONLINE
In early 2018, the FBI turned up its efforts against illegal drug trafficking on the dark web with the creation of the Joint Criminal Opioid Darknet Enforcement Team, or J-CODE. J-CODE was specifically formed to target illegal opioid distribution on the internet. J-CODE started with just over a dozen special agents and staff with a focus towards increased enforcement against dark web black markets. During the first few months of 2019, J-CODE spearheaded an operation called SaboTor, which went after suspected dark web illegal drug vendors. SaboTor was a collaborative effort between numerous federal agencies and Europe’s dark web team within Europol. Europol is the law enforcement agency for the European Union. SaboTor resulted in 61 arrests and shut down 50 illegal dark web accounts. Also, in 2019, federal authorities shut down a news website called the DeepDotWeb, a website that existed on the traditional internet, but linked users to dark net websites. Obviously, all of these efforts have been made to both make it more difficult to find the dark web, and to have the confidence to buy from the dark web without fear of prosecution.
HOW DOES THIS AFFECT ME?
The dark web market of illegal drugs looks like it’s here to stay for the foreseeable future. As different sites have been taken down, other sites have popped up and the illicit online markets have continued to be resilient and recover to some degree. The Department of Justice has recognized that dark web criminal markets have become “an enduring part of the criminal economy.” Organizations like J-CODE will continue to form as the government continues its “war on drugs.” If you have questions about dark net drug trafficking laws or think you may be at risk for prosecution, then it is important to seek the advice of an experienced federal drug trafficking attorney as soon as possible. The laws and enforcement of illegal activity online is an area that is evolving rapidly. It is your responsibility to understand these laws as they apply to you. Ignorance of the law is not a defense, and you will not be given a break just because you didn’t think you were breaking the law.
