Law Enforcement’s Had a Busy Week

🇦🇺 Floating down under… One week ago yesterday, Australian authorities reported they had arrested four people in relation to trafficking 917 pounds of cocaine that police found floating in the ocean off the country’s southern coast. The drugs carry a street value of over $166 million, the largest seizure ever in South Australia.

🇬🇧🍌 This story is bananas, B–A–N–A–N–A–S… Over in the UK, authorities one-upped their Australian counterparts, seizing 3.7 tons of coke worth ~$400 million (their largest seizure since 2015), per Home Secretary Priti Patel. Where’d they find it? Concealed within 20 pallets of fresh bananas that had recently arrived from Colombia.

🚫 Hail, Hydra… Is the opposite of what German and US authorities were saying this week after shutting down the Russian-linked Hydra Market, the world’s largest and longest-running darknet market. Since 2015, the site has facilitated more than $5 billion in black-market crypto transactions. (And in 2021, it accounted for ~80% of the entire darknet market.)

🇺🇸 A little closer to home… The Orange County DA’s office announced Wednesday that police had recovered 821 pounds of meth, 190 pounds of cocaine and ~21 pounds of fentanyl pills (enough to kill nearly 5 million people) in a drug bust. It’s the county’s biggest seizure in over 16 years.