The biggest darknet site went offline after authorities seized its operator.
Authorities from Germany have shut down what they claim to be the “world’s largest darknet marketplace.”
German authorities have switched off the servers for DarkMarket, a marketplace where over 2,400 vendors peddled narcotics, credit card data, and malware to around 500,000 users in 320,000 sales.
The exchange has processed $170M worth of trades, German prosecutors said. Over 4,650 Bitcoin and 12,800 Monero changed hands.
The marketplace pitched itself as led by a woman, proving that women were more than capable of facilitating drug cartels, passport forgery syndicates, and small credit card fraudsters.
“We are the first local marketplace, run exclusively by women!” read its “About Page,” tweeted Dark. Fail, a darknet journalist.
However, the man detained on suspicion of running DarkMarket was a 34-year-old man from Australia.
“Investigators expect to use the data saved there to launch new probes against the moderators, sellers and buyers of the marketplace,” prosecutors stated, reported by AFP.
The cybercrime unit of German’s Koblenz Public Prosecutor’s Office has led the investigation, which involved Europol, the UK’s National Crime Agency, the DEA, FBI, and the IRS.
The Officers have shut down more than 20 servers located in Moldova and Ukraine.
Dark.Fail supposed that the granularity of detail that law enforcement officers implied DarkMarket “indicates they may have analyzed the servers long before the arrest, possibly hacked the market in some way, or had an undercover staff member able to see counts in DarkMarket’s support interface.”
Services of many other dark web markets have also stuttered early this week after a bug took down all modern Tor addresses. Tor is the anonymous browser that is hosting the sites.
Yellow Brick Market, another popular marketplace, has disappeared, taking all the customer’s money with it. It is unclear why, although Dark.Fail believes that it can be a probable exit scam. The network operators skedaddle with all the money held in the network simultaneously; on dark web marketplaces, funds are mostly held in security.
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