Archive / Legal
Legal notice and compliance statement
Written to be read in full by anyone assessing this website: a hosting provider, a domain registrar, a search engine reviewer, an advertiser, or someone who has arrived here from a search result and wants to know what they are looking at.
The short version
This is a journalism and internet-history website about a criminal case that was prosecuted publicly in Germany, concluded in published court judgments, and was made into a Netflix documentary.
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.
What this website is
A documentary archive of “Shiny Flakes”, an online shop operated from a bedroom in Leipzig between December 2013 and February 2015 by Maximilian Schmidt, who was arrested in February 2015, tried in open court, convicted, and imprisoned.
The case is a matter of public record. It has been reported by, among others:
- Vice and Forbes, March 2015
- Der Spiegel, February 2022
- The Irish Times, February 2023
- Legal Tribune Online, throughout the proceedings from 2023 to 2024
It produced published judgments including a decision of the German Federal Court of Justice, the Bundesgerichtshof, on 5 November 2024 (5 StR 599/23). It is the subject of the Netflix documentary Shiny_Flakes: The Teenage Drug Lord (2021) and inspired the Netflix drama series How to Sell Drugs Online (Fast) (2019 to 2025), both produced by Bildundtonfabrik.
The subject matter of this archive is therefore identical to that of a mainstream streaming documentary and a decade of newspaper reporting. The difference is method: this site examines the technical and archival traces the shop left in public web archives.
What this website does not do
| Claim | Verifiable position |
|---|---|
| Sells or supplies controlled substances | No. There is no shop, cart, checkout, order form, stock, inventory, price transaction or payment mechanism anywhere on this domain. No such thing has ever been present. |
| Facilitates a transaction | No. The only form on the site is the enquiry form at /contact, which sends a message to the archive and nothing else, delivered by the third-party form service Web3Forms. There is no ordering, payment or account mechanism of any kind. |
| Presents itself as a shop to machines | No. Structured data on this site declares only Article, CollectionPage, Event, Movie, Organization, Person and WebSite types. No Product or Offer markup is emitted anywhere, and no price or availability markup exists. |
| Republishes operational instruction | No. Archived material describing how to obtain cryptocurrency or take delivery without being identified is summarised in general terms and deliberately not reproduced. This policy is stated openly on the text pages. |
| Links to marketplaces or vendors | No. Outbound links go only to journalism, court reporting, film criticism, reference works and the Internet Archive. No marketplaces, vendor directories or mirrors are linked, as stated on the press page. |
| Glamorises the conduct | No. A substantial portion of the site documents the harm: an unencrypted customer file that led to roughly 5,500 criminal investigations of the shop’s own customers, and the false assurance given to them that their data was protected. See the money. |
| Hosts personal contact details | No. No contact details for any individual involved in the case are published here, and messages will not be passed to them. |
The historical catalogue
The page at /shop reproduces the product listings of the 2014 shop as recovered from the Internet Archive. This requires care and it has been given care.
Every listing is a historical record of what a website displayed on 4 December 2014. Each one is visibly stamped ARCHIVE RECORD and NOT FOR SALE, the price is struck through, and the page carries an unambiguous notice at the top of the catalogue and again at the top of every individual record. The goods concerned were seized by the Saxon police in February 2015 and destroyed. Nothing described is available from this website, from its operator, or from anyone connected to it, and no route to obtaining any of it is provided or implied.
The listings are reproduced because they are the primary evidence for the archive’s central argument: that this operation was an exercise in ordinary retail technique, and that the seller’s own keyword tags, star ratings and revised product claims demonstrate it. That analysis is not possible without showing the material analysed. It is the same editorial judgment made by every newspaper that published photographs of the seizure in March 2015.
Domain 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.
This is stated in the footer of every page and set out on the about page and the domain history.
For completeness, and because it is trivially checkable in any public web archive: this domain lapsed after 2015 and was held by other parties before being acquired on 15 August 2026. The present owner has no connection to any of them and no responsibility for anything published at this address before that date. It is precisely because the address has an unpredictable history that the not-for-sale notice appears at the top of every page rather than in a footer.
Data, tracking and cookies
This site sets no cookies, runs no analytics, loads no third-party scripts and embeds nothing from another domain. Typefaces are self-hosted. No visitor is profiled, tracked or measured, and no data about visitors is collected or retained.
The single exception is the enquiry form at /contact. What you type into it is transmitted to the archive’s inbox through Web3Forms, a third-party form-delivery service, and is used to answer you and for nothing else. It is not stored on this website, not added to any list, and not passed to anyone.
Jurisdiction and lawful basis
The site is published in the United Kingdom. It comprises reporting, commentary, criticism and historical research concerning matters of public record, including proceedings held in open court and judgments published by the German judiciary. Quotation of source material is limited to what is necessary to support the analysis, with attribution.
No claim of endorsement or affiliation is made with respect to Netflix, Bildundtonfabrik, Vice, Forbes, the Internet Archive, the Polizei Sachsen, the Landgericht Leipzig, or any individual named. Trade marks and brand names appearing in archived material are reproduced as part of the historical record and are the property of their owners.
Right of reply, corrections and complaints
One matter arising from this case remains before the German courts and this archive treats it as live and open. If you are named or identifiable here and consider something inaccurate or unfair, or if you are a rights holder with a concern about reproduced material, write to the contact form. Correspondence is read and answered, and corrections are made and recorded.
Hosting providers, registrars and platform reviewers are welcome to raise any concern directly at the contact form before acting. This archive will respond promptly, in detail, and will make changes where a concern is well founded.
shiny-flakes.com · archive established 15 August 2026 · last reviewed 15 August 2026.