The biggest ever online black market - ten times the size of the notorious Silk Road - has been shut down.

AlphaBay, an internet marketplace with 200,000 members and 40,000 vendors selling drugs, counterfeit goods, weapons, hacking tools and other illicit items, has been taken offline by the Justice Department.

The dark web site was created by Canadian national Alexandre Cazes, a computer expert, who had been living in luxury in Thailand for the past eight years with three homes and four high end sports cars.

The 26-year-old was arrested in Bangkok on July 5 and was due to be extradited to the US, where he faced drug trafficking and money laundering charges, but was found dead in his cell just a week later. Thai authorities say Cazes hung himself.

The Justice Department seized control of his website AlphaBay, the largest of many illegal marketplaces that operate in hidden corners of the internet, and shut it down.

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AlphaBay (pictured) the biggest illegal drugs marketplace in internet history, has been shut down by the Justice Department

Some of the options for buyers to choose from on AlphaBay, from drugs to weapons

Visitors to the online marketplace paid through digital currencies such as Bitcoin. Officials say hundreds of vendors advertised either fentanyl or heroin (pictured)

Canadian national who ran AlphaBay, Alexandre Cazes (pictured) was arrested in Thailand on July 5. Earlier this week, Cazes was found dead in his Thai police cell

The site was operated on the Tor network, which helps users browse the internet anonymously. Visitors to the online marketplace paid through digital currencies such as Bitcoin.

Officials say hundreds of vendors advertised either fentanyl or heroin.

'This is the largest dark net marketplace take down in history,' Attorney General Jeff Sessions told reporters in Washington.

He accused online dealers of 'pouring fuel on the fire of the national drug epidemic' and warned that 'the darknet is not a place to hide.'

Law enforcement officials in the US and Europe say Cazes had amassed a fortune of $23 million from the illegal site and the Justice Department has filed a forfeiture complaint to seize assets connected to the operation.

AlphaBay went down on July 4, and sellers fled to the second biggest drug market Hansa, only to find out Thursday that police were monitoring it as well.

Sessions said underground websites AlphaBay and Hansa had tens of thousands of sellers of deadly drugs like fentanyl and other illicit goods serving more than 200,000 customers worldwide.

The website has been closed as Justice Department officials announce a takedown of the marketplace for drugs, counterfeit goods, weapons, hacking tools and other illicit items

Attorney General Jeff Sessions and other federal officials announced an indictment in California on Thursday

'This case, pursued by dedicated agents and prosecutors, says you are not safe, you cannot hide. We will find you, dismantle your organization and network, and we will prosecute you,' Sessions said in a warning to dark web entrepreneurs.

The double-whammy 'meant the Dutch police could identify and disrupt the regular criminal activity on Hansa but then also sweep up all those new users displaced from AlphaBay,' European law enforcement agency Europol said in a statement.

International police agencies now have some 10,000 addresses for Hansa buyers outside of Holland.

WHAT IS TOR? Tor - short for The Onion Router - is a seething matrix of encrypted websites that allows users to surf beneath the everyday internet with complete anonymity. It uses numerous layers of security and encryption to render users anonymous online. Normally, file sharing and internet browsing activity can be tracked by law enforcement through each user's unique IP address that can be traced back to an individual computer. The Tor network on the Deep Web hides the IP address and the activity of the user. The network has been linked to criminal activity such as drug dealing and even services to hire hit men. Most of the web's information is buried far down on dynamically generated sites, unable to be found or seen by traditional search engines - sites or pages don't exist until created as the result of a specific search. An internet search is like dragging a net across the surface of the sea - a great deal of information is caught, but a majority is deep and therefore missed. Advertisement

The two-step operation was 'psychological warfare,' said Nicolas Cristin, a darknet expert at Carnegie Mellon University.

'It is definitely going to create a bit of chaos,' he said. 'There have been takedowns in the past... And what we've seen in the past is initially there is quite a bit of turmoil for like a week or two weeks and then things cool down and people move to other marketplaces that haven't been taken down.'

'By acting together on a global basis the law enforcement community has sent a clear message that we have the means to identify criminality and strike back, even in areas of the Dark Web,' Europol exec Rob Wainwright said.

AlphaBay had been a massive marketplace for illicit goods, ten times larger than the notorious Silk Road underground cyber marketplace shut down by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation in 2013.

The founder of Silk Road was sentenced to life in prison by federal court in New York in 2015.

At the time it was shut down, it had more than 250,000 listings for illegal drugs and toxic chemicals, according to the US Justice Department.

It also had 100,000 advertisements for guns, stolen and fraudulent personal documents, counterfeit goods, malware and computer hacking tools.

The marketplaces operated underground on the Tor network, which allows anonymity for users.

With the takedown of AlphaBay and Hansa, authorities said they have frozen millions of dollars worth of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin used to settle online transactions without the buyers and sellers being identified.

They also seized from Cazes and his wife millions of dollars in currency, luxury cars, and homes.

Canadian drugs trafficker Alexander Cazes (pictured on a stretcher), 26, was found hanged in his cell in Bangkok after Thai police began his extradition process and seized his Lamborghini

Cazes was found dead on July 12 on the squalid toilet floor of his cell having hanged himself from the bathroom door with a towel

Officers visited Cazes' plush apartment and seized a grey Lamborghini, bought in Thailand

Cazes had moved to Thailand eight years ago, and Thai authorities say he was living the high life, with several Lamborghinis, at least three homes and even a hotel he owned in Thailand.

'He was a computer expert involved with international transactions of Bitcoins,' said Major General Soontorn Chalermkiat, a spokesman for Thailand's Narcotics Suppression Bureau.

'He didn't have any business in Thailand but he had many houses,' the officer said, adding that Cazes' Thai wife has since been charged with money laundering.

The computer programmer was arrested on July 5 and was being held awaiting extradition, when guards found him dead on the squalid toilet floor of his cell having hanged himself from the bathroom door with a towel on July 12.

Wainwright said the investigation had resulted in the identification of numerous organized crime figures and that intelligence leads have been distributed to law enforcement in 37 countries around the world.

'This operation is an example of the improving concerted ability of law enforcement to strike against criminals, even on the dark net,' he said.

This listing is advertising Uber account log in profiles for sale - presumably for buyers to enjoy free rides at the expense of others

Adverts for drugs, both prescription and illegal, were offered on the AlphaBay Market

'This coordinated hit against these two marketplaces is just a taste of what is to come in the future.'

Originally developed by U.S. Defense Department researchers to secure sensitive information, Tor was released into the public domain in 2004.

Like many secure systems such as the WhatsApp messaging app, its original purpose was for good, but has also been used by criminals hiding behind the system's anonymity.

Some people run Tor sites handling illicit activity, such as drug trafficking, weapons and human trafficking and even murder for hire.

The U.S. government has been interested in trying to find ways to use modern information technology and computer science to combat these criminal activities.

In 2014, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (more commonly known as DARPA), a part of the Defense Department, launched a program called Memex to fight human trafficking with these tools.

Authorities believe that most people only use a fraction of the internet. However, much of the deep web is perfectly legal, such as subscribed content, medical records, or legal documents. The dark web however, in which marketplaces like AlphaBay exist, are often used by people wanting to conduct illegal activities

Silk Road: The Deep Web has existed for more than a decade but first came under the spotlight after police shutdown the Silk Road website - the online marketplace dubbed the 'eBay of drugs - in 2013

Memex aimed to create a search index that would help law enforcement identify human trafficking operations online – in particular by mining the deep and dark web.

One of the key systems was Apache Tika which lets users understand any file and the information contained within it.

Employing Tika to monitor the deep and dark web continuously could help identify human- and weapons-trafficking situations shortly after the photos are posted online.