More than a million dollars' worth of Bitcoin that moved through darknet marketplaces nearly a decade ago has been forfeited to a regional English police force.

Avon and Somerset Police said Thursday that its financial investigation unit had recovered 20.21 BTC, additional cryptoassets, and money held in a bank account, worth a combined $1.4 million (£1,032,487.86). The person under investigation had a previous money laundering conviction and has since died.

With assistance from the force's cyber team, officers traced the holdings to darknet markets that operated between 2016 and 2019. The force said those sites, all of which have since been shut down, facilitated crimes ranging from drug supply to people trafficking, though it did not name them.

A well-documented era

That window covers the most heavily policed period in darknet history. AlphaBay, then the largest such market anywhere, was seized in July 2017, while Dutch police had already taken over Hansa and ran it covertly for a month, harvesting the details of users fleeing AlphaBay before shutting it down the same day. Dream Market, which absorbed much of the remaining traffic, announced its own closure in March 2019 and went dark at the end of April.

Every transaction those markets processed remains visible. "Many people think cryptocurrencies... place assets beyond the reach of law enforcement," said Detective Constable Anthony Davis of the force's financial investigation unit, pointing to the permanent record on the blockchain as "an invaluable source of evidence." Chainalysis and other blockchain analytics firms have built a substantial business on exactly that premise, selling tracing tools to police forces and tax authorities worldwide, and UK agencies including the National Crime Agency have reported recovering hundreds of millions of pounds in crypto linked to criminal proceeds in recent years.

The seizure is the largest the force has recorded since crypto wallet freezing orders became available in the UK in April 2024. Those powers, introduced under the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023, allow officers to freeze and seize crypto without making an arrest first, move it into wallets controlled by law enforcement, and confiscate written passwords or storage devices. Police can also destroy an asset outright if required, and the government singled out privacy coins as "not conducive to the public good" when the rules came into force. Similar powers exist in the United States, where civil forfeiture of crypto tied to darknet markets has been a law enforcement tool for years, most notably in the cases arising from the 2013 Silk Road seizure.

The assets were forfeited earlier this year under the Proceeds of Crime Act, after a court accepted that they represented the proceeds of unlawful conduct. Money recovered under the act is directed into community and policing programs, a mechanism that gives forces a direct funding incentive to pursue crypto-traced assets alongside conventional confiscation work.

At current prices, the Bitcoin alone would be worth around $1.6 million. The force did not say when its valuation was struck.