For a mixer to be shutdown this easily, something is not adding up!
I Wonder whose buttons got pressed for this to unravel....domain provider.....unsatisfied customer???
i don't think it's very hard when the servers are stored in the netherlands and luxembourg, lol. with TOR so full of holes and the network so full of adversaries, IP address obfuscation is only as useful as police inability to enter your jurisdiction.
the FIOD said they were sitting on this case for a years time. i'm guessing those servers have been mirrored for many months already. the domain is just an afterthought.
best suggestion ITT:
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.