Dutch police shut down longstanding revenge porn site, Anon-IB, and arrested 3 men from the Netherlands, following an investigation that began in March 2017
After seizing the website's servers, police discover hundreds of women fell victim to hackers who stole their photos.
Context & Ripple Effects
The Anon-IB shutdown lands weeks after Wired's reporting on Operation Bayonet, the Dutch sting that took over Hansa and harvested data on roughly 420K users — evidence that the Dutch police had already turned infrastructure seizure into a repeatable playbook. Anon-IB applies the same method to a different target: not a dark web market but an image board, with an investigation running since March 2017 before the servers were taken.
What makes the seizure consequential is what the servers yielded: evidence that hundreds of women had photos stolen by hackers, meaning the takedown is also a mass-victim identification operation, not just a site removal.
First-order effects
- Three Dutch men are arrested and face prosecution, while the seized servers give police a victim map of hundreds of women whose stolen photos can now be traced back to specific hackers.
- Anon-IB's user community loses its longstanding hub overnight, and anyone who posted there is exposed in the seized data.
Second-order effects
- Operators of similar image boards face pressure to move hosting to jurisdictions seen as less cooperative — a gap the Ecatel data center, investigated for years while still hosting abuse shows remains real inside the Netherlands itself.
- The Dutch police's seizure-then-mine approach gets validated again, setting up the cross-border template later seen in the Sky ECC infiltration with Belgian police.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, enforcement shifts from chasing individual posters to capturing the platform itself, with every seized server feeding a pipeline of follow-on arrests — the model Europol and German police applied at scale against the Cracked and Nulled hacking forums.
- Hosting jurisdictions become the structural battleground: where a site's servers sit increasingly determines whether it survives, pushing abusive platforms toward the pockets of lax enforcement that investigations like Ecatel's highlight.
The trend: Law enforcement is converging on seize-the-infrastructure operations — taking over servers, mining them for identities, and cascading arrests — with Dutch police as the recurring pioneer.