The most interesting thing is that there's no information about anyone arrested with the case.
Means the author is probably still here?
According to media reports, no arrests have been made. Maybe the owners successfully obfuscated their identities when registering the site and operating the servers. Stranger things have happened.
I'm leaning towards the honeypot angle, myself. Nobody is stupid enough to run this service from the Netherlands.
Doesn't anyone remember
what the Dutch police did with Hansa? They hijacked the market and ran it themselves, altering code and social engineering sellers into leaking their location and other identifying info.
In their probe into that free-trade zone, which would come to be known as Operation Bayonet, the Dutch investigators not only identified the two alleged administrators of Hansa's black market operation in Germany, but went so far as to hijack the two arrested men's accounts to take full control of the site itself.
'We thought maybe we could really damage the trust in this whole system.' -Marinus Boekelo, NHTCU
The NHTCU officers explained how, in the undercover work that followed, they surveilled Hansa's buyers and sellers, discreetly altered the site's code to grab more identifying information of those users, and even tricked dozens of Hansa's anonymous sellers into opening a beacon file on their computers that revealed their locations.
These Dutch police are ruthless and sneaky. I wouldn't put it past them to spin up the site themselves. Now they have a treasure chest of data on darknet smugglers. I'm sure many arrests will come from this. Probably none to do with operation of the mixer though.