UK Police Seize $1.4M in Bitcoin Traced to Shuttered Darknet Markets

In brief

• Avon and Somerset Police forfeited 20.21 Bitcoin along with other crypto and bank funds worth $1.4 million (£1.03 million).
• Investigators traced the assets to darknet marketplaces that operated between 2016 and 2019 and have since been closed by law enforcement.
• It is the force's largest crypto seizure since the UK introduced crypto wallet freezing orders in April 2024.

Over a million dollars worth of Bitcoin that moved through darknet marketplaces nearly a decade ago has been forfeited to a regional English police force.

Avon and Somerset Police said Thursday its financial investigation unit had recovered 20.21 BTC, further cryptoassets and money held in a bank account, worth $1.4 million (£1,032,487.86) combined. The person under investigation had a previous money laundering conviction and has since died.

Officers traced the holdings, with help from the force's cyber team, to darknet markets running from 2016 to 2019. The force said those sites, all since shut down, had facilitated crimes from drug supply to people trafficking. It did not name them.

A well-documented era

That window covers the most heavily policed period in darknet history. AlphaBay, then the largest such market anywhere, was seized in July 2017, while Dutch police had already taken over Hansa and ran it covertly for a month, harvesting the details of users fleeing AlphaBay before shutting it the same day. Dream Market, which absorbed much of the remaining traffic, announced its own closure in March 2019 and went dark at the end of April.