This shop closed 26 February 2015
This address sold
a tonne of drugs.
Every page of it survived.
For fourteen months shiny-flakes.com was the largest online drug shop in Germany. The Saxon police shut it down in February 2015 and destroyed everything in it. What they could not touch was the record: the full catalogue, the customer reviews, the delivery statistics and the page they left behind. All of it is set out here.
Background: the shop's own homepage banner, captured 4 May 2014. Desaturated.
Six things about this website that are true
It was not hiding on the dark web
It was doing search engine optimisation. That is the part everyone misses, and it is the reason any of this survives to be read.
Shiny Flakes ran on WordPress with the WooCommerce shopping cart, on a commercial theme called Maximize, behind Cloudflare: the same stack a bakery was being sold in 2013. That supplied the cart, the checkout, customer accounts, order statuses, the star-rating widget and the product tags, and every one of them was used properly. The recovered listings carry keywords chosen for what German buyers would actually type: koks, schnee, pervitin. 110 distinct tags across 28 products.
There was an onion address, and there were vendor profiles on the darknet markets of the day. The shop thought little of them: the buyers there wanted conversation it was not willing to have, and the markets, in its own words, come and go as they please. Within four months of that being written, Evolution had absconded with its users’ money.
The shop was the ordinary web, competing for ordinary traffic, using ordinary techniques, run by someone who read the manual. Then a package went out with insufficient postage.
What is in here
All 28 listings, as they stood
Recovered from a single crawl on 4 December 2014, with prices, star ratings, stock status, the original keyword tags and 24 of the product photographs.
What the markup gives away
The software it ran, the month the keyword tags appeared, and the title tag that dates exactly when cannabis left the range.
The spreadsheet, and 5,500 people
The shop kept immaculate customer records while telling buyers it deleted them. Prosecutors in all sixteen federal states were still working the file years later.
Netflix, twice
A comedy-drama inspired by the case, then a documentary, from the same production company. On the prosecution case a second shop was running while the film was made.
Three addresses, one shop
Why Netflix wrote shinyflakes.com, why the real one had a hyphen, and why every surviving fragment sits on this address and nowhere else.
32 sources, 13 of them German
Including the Motherboard Germany coverage that no longer exists at source, recovered here. Every claim on this site traces back to one of them.
Nothing on this website is for sale. There is no cart, no checkout and no stock. The shop documented here was shut down by the Saxon police in 2015 and everything in it was destroyed. What this site is.