People

# What happens to operators after a takedown

Charges, arrests, extraditions, convictions and the outcomes that do not get announced.

Computed from the published tables at the August 23, 2026 research cutoff. Last reviewed August 23, 2026.

Takedowns are announced in terms of infrastructure. What happens to the people is a longer and much less evenly reported story. The index records 309 procedural actions against 115 named individuals, across 23 countries.

| Action | Recorded |
| --- | --- |
| Charged | 90 |
| Arrested | 57 |
| Sentenced | 46 |
| Pleaded guilty | 40 |
| Indicted | 17 |
| Extradited | 16 |
| Wanted | 14 |
| Released | 8 |
| Convicted | 6 |
| Sanctioned | 5 |
| Acquitted | 3 |
| Deceased | 3 |
| Extradition requested | 2 |
| Charges dismissed | 1 |
| Identified | 1 |

The shape of that list matters more than any single row. Charges outnumber sentences by a wide margin, which is partly because cases take years and partly because the end of a case is far less likely to be announced than the beginning. A charging release is news. A sentencing three years later usually is not.

## The outcomes nobody announces

The small rows are the interesting ones. Acquittals, dismissed charges and releases appear in single digits, and they are almost never in the original announcement. They are recorded here because a record that only tracks the accusation and never the outcome is not a record of what happened, it is a record of what was claimed.

People recorded as wanted are still fugitives as far as the located sources establish. Extradition is carried as its own action rather than being folded into an arrest, because the two are different events in different jurisdictions and merging them would double-count one person as two apprehensions.

## Named people are not all people

This is the counting rule that trips up most readers. Official releases report aggregate figures. Across the cohort those reported totals come to 469 people charged, while the index names 115 individuals in total. Those two numbers are never added together and neither is a subset of the other in any clean way.

The named table covers publicly identified natural persons. Aggregate multinational sweeps publish counts and occasionally handles, but not identities, and no placeholder people were invented to make the totals line up. So a record can report dozens charged while naming nobody, and that is a reporting fact rather than a gap in the enforcement.

## How well documented the procedure is

191 actions name the court and 182 carry a docket number, which is what makes them checkable against the underlying case rather than only against the release. 46 record the sentence itself. 289 of 309 carry a date.

59 of 105 counted incidents name nobody at all. Some of those had no arrests. Others had arrests that were announced as a number. The index does not distinguish between the two unless a source does, which is the same discipline applied to [missing counts everywhere else](https://takedownindex.org/research/unknown-is-not-zero). Browse the individuals from [the people index](https://takedownindex.org/people).

Every figure above is derived from the published tables and can be recomputed from them. [Download the data](https://takedownindex.org/data), then read the [counting rules](https://takedownindex.org/about/counting-incidents) and the [known limitations](https://takedownindex.org/about/known-limitations) before citing any of it.