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About this archive
A documentary record of a criminal case that ran through the German courts, assembled from the Internet Archive and tthe shop published press record, and published at the address where the events took place.
Nothing here is for sale
Nothing on this website is for sale. No product, substance or service is offered, supplied or obtainable here, and no transaction of any kind is possible on this domain.
There is no shop, no cart, no checkout, no order form and no stock. Nothing is supplied, sourced, recommended or obtainable through this website or through anyone connected with it. The goods described in the historical catalogue were seized by the Saxon police in February 2015 and destroyed. If you have arrived here intending to buy something, there is nothing for you here and there never will be.
Provenance
This domain was acquired on 15 August 2026. This site has no connection to the events described on it, to anyone involved in them, or to any previous owner or operator of the domain.
The domain was bought because it is a significant piece of internet history and the only address anywhere holding a surviving record of the shop. In the years between it changed hands more than once, as lapsed domains do. The full ownership history is set out here.
Why it exists
Because the interesting thing about this case is not the crime, which was ordinary, but the artefact, which is not. Shiny Flakes was a WordPress site. It had a shopping cart, a star-rating widget, product tags chosen for search, an FAQ in two languages, a country-by-country delivery table and a page publishing its own weekly fulfilment metrics. It is one of the most complete surviving records of what ordinary e-commerce software looked like when pointed at something it was never built for, and most of it had never been examined.
It also exists because the standard account of the case is wrong in small ways that compound. The wrong domain is usually named. The figures are quoted with a confidence the sources do not support. And the part that actually mattered - that the shop's record-keeping put around five and a half thousand of its own customers in front of prosecutors - gets a paragraph, if that.
What is original here
Most of this site is assembled from published sources, all credited on the press page. The following was not published anywhere before this archive assembled it:
- The reconstructed catalogue - all 28 listings with prices, star ratings, stock status and the seller’s own keyword tags
- The permalink revisions - four products whose URLs preserve purity and dosage claims the shop later quietly changed
- The dispatch-time chart - the shop's own published performance figures, showing service degrading eightfold in the autumn of 2014
- The title-tag timeline - independently dating when cannabis left the range, corroborating what the operator told an interviewer
- The takeover page source and its Impressum - including the fact that the police filed a legally compliant operator notice on a seized drug shop
- The domain history - establishing which address was the shop and which never were
Use any of it, with a credit and a link.
Editorial rules
- Analysis over reproduction. Archived material is described and quoted selectively. Passages giving practical instruction - obtaining cryptocurrency, taking delivery without being identified - are summarised, not reproduced.
- Disagreements are shown, not resolved. Sources on this case contradict each other on almost every headline figure. Where they do, both are given.
- Inference is labelled as inference. Where this archive draws a conclusion the sources do not state, it says so.
- No links to anything transactional. Journalism, court reporting, criticism and reference works only. No marketplaces, vendor directories or mirrors.
- No glamour, and no sermon either. The shop was genuinely well run and saying so is not praise. The cost is documented on the same site and at the same length.
- Corrections get made. Particularly on the live retrial, which is the most likely thing here to fall out of date.
Method
The catalogue and text pages were recovered from the Internet Archive’s CDX index for this domain and parsed from the raw captures rather than from rendered screenshots, which is how the tags, ratings and permalinks came through intact. The press record was assembled by working outward from the German court reporting. Where a source is behind a paywall or no longer exists at its original address, that is stated.
This archive is not affiliated with Netflix, Bildundtonfabrik, Vice, the Internet Archive, the Polizei Sachsen, or any person named in these pages, and earns nothing from any link on it.
Contact
Media enquiries, permissions, corrections and additional sources: the contact page.
shiny-flakes.com · archive established 15 August 2026.