CSI Cyber: Amsterdam

I'm sure it went kinda like this

Fascinating WIRED article about a wildly successful cybercrime investigation, this time in Europe in late 2016.  Law enforcement agencies, led by the Netherlands', worked cross-border raiding an online drug market "Hansa".  Instead of immediately shutting it down, they took over the admin rights, letting it run business as usual for weeks, as they collected mountains of incriminating evidence.  In the end:

"The Dutch police came away from their Hansa takeover with concrete rewards: They obtained at least some data on 420,000 users, including at least 10,000 home addresses, which they've turned over to Europol to be distributed to other police agencies around Europe and the world.  Since the takedown, [Officer Gert] Ras says, they've arrested a dozen of Hansa's top vendors, with more arrests planned for coming weeks.  They seized 1,200 bitcoins from Hansa, worth about $12 million by today's exchange rates. Since Hansa used bitcoin's multi-signature transaction function to protect funds from police seizure, that confiscation was only possible because the [Netherlands National High Tech Crime Unit] had taken over the site and sabotaged its code to disable that feature during Hansa's last month online."

On a weirder unrelated note, researchers discovered child pornography embedded within the Bitcoin blockchain.  Whew.