Europol has confirmed that an investigation conducted by a coalition of law enforcement agencies across the globe has resulted in the closure of major dark web contraband emporium Wall Street Market.

An operation involving police from Germany, the Netherlands and the US resulted in the arrests of three men suspected of being the main operators of the site, as well as the seizure of cash and cryptocurrency worth millions of dollars.

The arrests come after a linked investigation carried out by Finnish customs officials and police in France earlier this year resulted in the closure of Silkkitie, which also went by the name of the Valhalla Marketplace.

Wall Street Market, which is thought to have been the world’s second-largest dark web marketplace, had over 1.1 million users and 5,400 vendors, the latter of which used the platform to offer contraband including drugs, weapons, cyber crime tools, stolen credit card and identity information, and even the services of underworld hitmen.

German nationals Tibo Lousee, Jonathan Kalla and Klaus-Martin Frost were arrested following a number of raids on properties that were thought to be linked to the site, with investigators in the US last week charging them with running the site.

One of Wall Street Market’s vendors who is alleged to have offered methamphetamine by the kilo is also said to have been charged with drug offences as a result of the operation.

It was reported last month that the operators behind the site had pulled an exit scam, diverting an estimated $11 million held in escrow by site users to their personal accounts before closing the platform down.

The site’s administrators took a commission of up to 6% on every sale made on the platform.

In a statement, Europol Executive Director Catherine De Bolle commented: “These two investigations show the importance of law enforcement cooperation at an international level and demonstrate that illegal activity on the dark web is not as anonymous as criminals may think.”

US Assistant Attorney General Brian Benczkowski said: “This operation sends a crystal-clear message: dark markets offer no safe haven.

“The arrest and prosecution of the criminals who allegedly ran this darknet marketplace is a great example of our partnership with law enforcement authorities in Europe, with the support of Europol, and demonstrates what we can do when we stand together.”

Wall Street Market is the latest in a string of dark web marketplaces to be closed down over the course of the past year, with investigators across the globe increasingly taking action against buyers and vendors who have used these platforms as well as the administrators who run them.

Download a hi-res version of our new infographic here

The European Union is set to implement a system to track and trace tobacco products all along the supply chain this May, in line with the Tobacco Products Directive it passed in 2014. According to EU officials, the scheme meets a mandate from the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) Protocol to Eliminate Illicit Trade in Tobacco Products, to which the EU is a party.

Track and trace systems have the potential to be vital tools in the fight against the illicit tobacco trade. Under-the-table smokes are “the commodity of choice” for organised crime groups, deprive governments of badly-needed tax revenue, and undermine public health initiatives by making tobacco products available at cheap prices, most importantly to highly price-sensitive groups such as young people.

The EU is by no means immune to the parallel trade in tobacco products, which costs the bloc’s governments an estimated €10 to 20 billion a year; illicit smokes make up roughly 10% of European consumption. What’s more, in some areas of the Union, the situation is getting worse. Tobacco smuggling across the Lithuanian-Belarusian border nearly doubled in 2018, and there are grave concerns a no-deal Brexit could lead to rampant illicit trade across the Irish border.

Parliamentary dissent

Against this backdrop, the May rollout of the EU’s track-and-trace scheme is welcome news. Unfortunately, the system the European bloc is planning to implement has already drawn substantial criticism from MEPs and public health bodies, who argue that the scheme is not  independent from the tobacco industry. The WHO Protocol specifies any track-and-trace system must be clearly separate from the tobacco sector’s influence; tobacco manufacturers’ long history of obstructionism and complicity in the smuggling of their own products indicate that they simply can’t be trusted. As recently as 2014, British American Tobacco (BAT) was fined in the UK for deliberately oversupplying overseas markets which it knew would make it into the hands of smugglers.

These various concerns underpinned Romanian MEP Cristian-Silviu Busoi’s January seminar on how to stamp out the parallel tobacco trade. Another, similar, debate will be held on Wednesday, February 27^th, helmed by MEP Younous Omarjee. Both Busoi and Omarjee are suggesting that the Tobacco Products Directive may need to be modified in order to ensure the EU’s track-and-trace scheme is made compliant with the WHO Protocol, a higher legal norm, and does not unduly entrust responsibilities to the tobacco industry.

As Omarjee’s stated in a press release, the MEP “wants to understand why the European Commission is going out of its way to entrust the fight against the parallel trade in tobacco, fed by cigarette manufacturers, to the tobacco lobby and people close to it.”

The WHO’s approach

NGOs present at the January seminar, from the European Network for Smoking Prevention to the European Cancer League (represented by prominent anti-tobacco activist Luk Joossens), agreed that among the many key changes to the Directive would include making sure that data storage providers are not selected and paid by tobacco manufacturers. The International Tax Stamp Association (ITSA), which has challenged the EU system before the European Court of Justice on the grounds that it is in breach of the WHO Protocol, agreed that, among other things, any track and trace system should be placed under the protocol signatories’ direct control. Against the backdrop of this plethora of concerns, the European Commission representative at Busoi’s conference noted that the EU system is up for review in 2021.

Our exclusive new infographic illustrates the shortcomings of the EU track & trace system. Leaving aside the security features aspect of the system, which is controversial in and of itself, the infographic highlighting its numerous discrepancies with the scheme provided for by the WHO Protocol.

The WHO calls for a logical, linear process in which it defines a set of requirements for the Protocol’s parties to enforce. A public, open and competitive tender by the parties to the Protocol is supposed to select the best service providers, entirely independent from the tobacco industry, which then take on the key missions of “track and trace”: generating unique identifier codes, printing or affixing these codes to tobacco products, verifying on the production line that the codes are linked to the right products and providing governments with a database and related alert system. Public authorities, including customs, police forces and the judiciary, then have the means to control tobacco products all along the supply chain and convict those responsible for illicit trade.

Europe’s problematic alternative

In contrast, the European system is highly convoluted. Member states only carry out tenders for the service providers charged with generating the codes, while the European Commission oversees the selection of database providers. Most problematically, the EU scheme requires the tobacco manufacturers to both affix and verify the codes in their factories—two of the most essential steps of tracking and tracing tobacco products. The industry also has a hand in selecting and remunerating both the data storage providers and the auditors intended to oversee the system.

Under this scheme, unlike that outlined by the WHO, separate databases are required, while tobacco manufacturers each select their own preferred partners for data storage, which transfers its data to the secondary repository for public authorities. The involvement of the tobacco industry and its network of preferred suppliers in three of the four core missions in the EU proposal understandably raise serious doubts about whether the data generated by the system will truly be objective, and whether its use by judicial authorities will be efficient in tackling the illicit tobacco trade.

EU Health Commissioner Vytenis Andriukaitis has underlined that tobacco consumption is the single biggest cause of avoidable death in the EU, and expressed his hope that the implementation of track and trace would help Brussels crack down on the illicit trade which furthers it. Unfortunately, as it stands, the EU proposal falls short of what’s needed to effectively regulate the sector —and fails to fulfil the bloc’s obligations under the WHO Protocol.

Big Tobacco is testing out a new strategy to hijack public health initiatives. Attempting to skew popular perceptions, industry body Tobacco Institute of South Africa (Tisa) is paying social media celebrities to promote the hashtag #TakeBackTheTax, in an aggressive effort to co-opt the fight against illicit tobacco trade.

Tisa’s latest campaign is timed meticulously, following South Africa’s July announcement of proposed anti-tobacco legislation aimed at curbing advertising for tobacco and smoking in public places. The stringent Control of Tobacco Products and Electronic Delivery Systems Bill also includes measures to institute plain packaging, a ban on point-of-sale advertising and displays, and the prohibition of the sale of single cigarettes. Violators of the new law, if it is passed, would face fines and up to three months in jail.

#TakeBackTheTax is far from the tobacco industry’s only weapon to derail the new tobacco control legislation. Japan Tobacco International (JTI) has already poured money into radio adverts encouraging the public to protest the proposals on freedom of choice grounds. Meanwhile Tisa has employed scare tactics for months, implying that the proposed law would be responsible for everything from investors fleeing South Africa to bankrolling organised crime syndicates.

Tisa has tried to justify its opposition to the proposed legislation by claiming that the government is using inaccurate economic impact data. The real story behind the tobacco industry’s united resistance to the legislation, however, is far more sinister. Big Tobacco’s indignation at this new bill is merely an escalation of the industry’s long-standing efforts to interject itself in government initiatives against tobacco smuggling, relying—as ever—on relentless misdirection to “paint itself as both the victim and the saviour”.

This modus operandi is a well-established staple of Big Tobacco. Indeed, the industry’s self-reported good intentions routinely threaten to derail international policy efforts against tobacco smuggling. Tobacco companies have used data they themselves have funded to overstate the size of the cigarette black market and to claim that plain packaging efforts will lead to a rise in illicit trade.

Not only has this been thoroughly debunked by a number of studies, but evidence indicates that Big Tobacco is itself complicit in the trade, with cigarette manufacturers using the black market as a means of tax avoidance. Former British American Tobacco (BAT) chairman Kenneth Clarke even admitted to producing cigarettes he knew would end up sold under the table when he brazenly claimed: “Where any government is unwilling to act [on stamping out illicit tobacco trade] or their efforts are unsuccessful, we act, completely within the law, on the basis that our brands will be available alongside those of our competitors in the smuggled as well as the legitimate market”.

Big Tobacco’s manipulative attempts to rebrand itself as an anti-smuggling crusader are particularly in the spotlight in the lead up to two key October tobacco control meetings: the COP8 and MOP1, aimed at taking stock of the progress on implementing the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) – an international tobacco control standard signed by 168 countries.

With the FCTC Protocol to Eliminate Illicit Trade in Tobacco Products finally coming into effect on 25 September, jurisdictions are trying to nail down the particulars of how they will track and trace (T&T) tobacco products to tackle the lucrative smuggling operations. As policymakers hash out the details of how they will follow tobacco products from factory to consumer, Big Tobacco representatives are bent on getting their fingers in the pie.

The FCTC Protocol stipulates that global T&T efforts must be wholly independent from the tobacco industry. In spite of this, tobacco giant Philip Morris International (PMI) has thus far been allowed to adapt its own tracking system, Codentify—which it licensed to three of its fellow tobacco giants at no cost— to meet T&T requirements.

The technology PMI has cooked up, rightfully described as a Trojan horse, fails basic security requirements and is open to code cloning, recycling and migration—all while compromising the confidentiality of enforcement investigations. Codentify’s true purpose, namely shielding and preserving the tobacco industry’s vested interest in the black market for cigarettes, is clear.

The FCTC Secretariat has made it clear that Codentify is not an acceptable solution. To that end, it specified that Codentify is not even strictly speaking a T&T system, but rather “a code generator system installed at the production line that creates unique codes on packs” which might conceal hidden features unbeknownst to everyone but the tobacco companies which created it. Despite the FCTC’s outspoken opposition to Codentify or similar technology, the tobacco industry’s relentless lobbying has paid some dividends: the EU is putting in place a “mixed” solution to T&T, in which some responsibilities would be entrusted to the industry.

Policymakers around the world should need no further evidence as to why the tobacco industry cannot be trusted to weigh in on the fight against cigarette smuggling, but sneaky public relations ploys like the #TakeBackTheTax campaign just emphasise how untrustworthy Big Tobacco really is.