Archive / Timeline
Timeline
From a bedroom in Gohlis to the Fifth Criminal Senate of the Bundesgerichtshof. Where reputable sources contradict each other - and on this case they contradict each other constantly - the contradiction is shown rather than quietly resolved.
- 1994Before
Maximilian Schmidt is born
Grows up in Gohlis, a residential district in the north of Leipzig. By his own account in the Netflix documentary, a competent, bored teenager with a fast internet connection and no particular interest in drugs.
- December 2013The shop
Shiny Flakes opens
The shop begins trading. It runs on WordPress with WooCommerce - the same software a village bakery would use - on a theme called Maximize, behind Cloudflare, on servers in the Netherlands. Schmidt is nineteen. The delivery spreadsheet later recovered by police begins this month.
- 4 May 2014The shop
First capture of shiny-flakes.com
The Internet Archive takes its first snapshot of the clearnet shop. The page title is a keyword list rather than a name, and the site is already fully operational: cart, checkout, accounts, lost-password flow, FAQ in two languages.
- Early September 2014The shop
He gives an interview
After several weeks of email exchange, Motherboard Germany publishes a long interview with the operator. He describes analytics, customer surveys, a supply chain reaching Dutch pill presses, and a team - speaking throughout as "we". He also confirms he is based in Germany. Reporting afterwards treats the interview as one of the things that helped narrow the search.
- 4 December 2014The shop
The catalogue is captured
A crawler walks the shop and preserves all 28 listings with prices, star ratings, stock status and tags. It is the most complete surviving picture of what the shop actually sold, and it is the basis of the catalogue on this site.
- 24 February 2015The raid
The courier is taken
Vice reports that a Bulgarian courier, named in German reporting as Zhivko Z., delivers a resupply and is arrested in a car park shortly afterwards. The intercepted delivery is reported as 25,000 ecstasy pills, 27kg of amphetamine, 20kg of hash and 10,000 doses of LSD.
Sources disagreeVice places the courier arrest on 24 February; most other accounts compress the courier arrest and the flat raid into a single date of 26 February. - 26 February 2015The raid
The bedroom is raided
Police enter the flat in Gohlis, where he lives with his mother. They find the stock on shelves in his childhood bedroom, along with packaging materials, scales, vacuum sealers, phones and cash. Two files end the case immediately: a plain text document containing his logins, and an unencrypted spreadsheet named Bestellungen.xls - "orders.xls" - listing every delivery made since December 2013, with names, addresses, payment data and tracking numbers.
Sources disagreeThe date is given as 26 February by most English sources and German Wikipedia, and as 27 February by Motherboard Germany and DeepDotWeb. Seizure totals differ too: 320kg (Vice), 341kg (German Wikipedia), 360kg (Forbes). Cash is EUR 48,000 or EUR 49,000. Value is EUR 4.1m or USD 4.2m. - From spring 2015After
The spreadsheet goes to work on its customers
Bestellungen.xls held roughly 14,000 entries. Motherboard reported, on confirmation from the Leipzig prosecutor's office, that 4,516 people in Germany were investigated as a result and around 1,000 further proceedings were opened abroad - close to 5,500 in total, worked through by prosecutors in all sixteen federal states, and still running two and a half years later. The shop had told customers their data was deleted every two days. It was not.
- 11 March 2015The raid
The takeover, and 38 warrants
Thirty-eight search warrants are executed and further arrests follow. At 20:16:31 UTC the Internet Archive captures shiny-flakes.to serving a police page: the title reads "Sorry :-(", a hidden HTML comment reads YOUR ACCESS HAS BEEN TRACKED, and the body is a Polizei Sachsen recruitment advert - VERDACHTIG GUTE JOBS, "suspiciously good jobs". Beneath it, an Impressum.
- 13 March 2015The raid
The photographs go worldwide
Police release images of the seized stock stacked in the bedroom. Forbes and Vice publish the same day. The pictures - a teenager's room turned into a warehouse - become the defining image of the case and, six years later, the visual grammar of a Netflix series.
- 24 August 2015The courts
The trial opens in Leipzig
Schmidt is tried alongside the courier. Prosecutors describe the operation as an "Amazon for drugs". Because the court finds him emotionally immature, he is tried under juvenile law - a decision that caps his exposure far below the adult tariff.
- November 2015The courts
Seven years in juvenile detention
The sentence is seven years under Jugendstrafrecht. Reporting at the time notes he could have faced fifteen as an adult. Not every cryptocurrency wallet is decrypted, and where the money went has never been fully established.
- June 2019After
Released after four years and seven months
He is released on licence having served just over half the sentence.
- April 2019 onwardsAfter
Candylove
Prosecutors later allege a second shop, candylove.to, set up from April 2019 - beginning, they say, while he was still serving his sentence on day release. The alleged volume is a fraction of the first: roughly 500 shipments and around 20kg of narcotics between 2019 and 2021.
- 3 August 2021After
The documentary lands
Netflix releases Shiny_Flakes: The Teenage Drug Lord. Schmidt sits for the camera, unrepentant and precise. The film is made by Bildundtonfabrik, the same production company behind the fictional series his case inspired. He is, at the time of filming, allegedly running Candylove.
- February 2022The courts
Charged again
Der Spiegel and Tarnkappe report the new indictment at the Landgericht Leipzig.
- 17 May 2023The courts
Four and a half years
The 8th Criminal Chamber of the Landgericht Leipzig convicts him of commercial trafficking. The court rejects the prosecution's gang-trafficking theory, finding too few principals to constitute a Bande.
- 5 November 2024The courts
The Bundesgerichtshof quashes it
The Fifth Criminal Senate sets the conviction aside (5 StR 599/23). The findings of external fact stand, but the chamber failed to properly examine whether a Bande existed. The case returns to a different chamber in Leipzig. The direction of travel is not in his favour: if gang membership is established, section 30a BtMG carries a minimum of five years. Separately, 2.64kg of hashish is reclassified under the new cannabis statute, which helps him.
- Since November 2024The courts
Retrial, and liberty in the meantime
He remains at liberty pending the rehearing. No final verdict has been reported in the sources consulted for this archive. This entry is the one most likely to be out of date; if you know better, the contact address is on the About page.
This entry is open and may be out of date.
- 15 August 2026Now
This domain changes hands
shiny-flakes.com is acquired by the present owner, who has no connection to any of the above, and turned into this archive. Between roughly 2020 and 2022 an unrelated party had run a copycat storefront on the same address; that is over, and it was never Schmidt.
Why the numbers never agree
There are 2 points in this timeline where the published record contradicts itself, and it is worth understanding why, because the same figures get recycled endlessly without anyone saying where they came from.
The seizure totals differ because they measure different things: what was in the flat, what was in the intercepted courier delivery, and what the two add up to. The total handled differs because one figure counts what was shipped to customers and the other counts everything that passed through his hands. The revenue differs because €4.1m and €4.4m are respectively the value attributed at the raid and the bitcoin received across the whole trading period, and because the dollar conversions were done at 2015 rates and never updated.
The arrest date differs for the dullest reason of all: the courier was taken first, the flat was searched afterwards, and different outlets picked different moments to call the arrest. Vice says 24 February for the courier. Most sources say 26 February for the flat. Motherboard Germany and DeepDotWeb both say 27 February.
Anyone who quotes a single confident figure for this case is quoting somebody else. The sources are all listed here so you can check which.