In the Dark Web there are all kinds of portals to carry out the sale of illegal products . Among them are drugs, weapons and even malware. Every few years one of the largest sales portals usually closes, and now it is the turn of the one who had taken over the throne after the closure of the previous leader.
Since 2017, it’s been a rare year that hasn’t seen a huge black market close on the Deep Web. In 2017 AlphaBay closed, in 2018 Black Hand, and in 2019 three closed almost immediately: Dream Market, Wall Street Market and Deep Dot Web. Since then, one of the most important that the witness had collected had been DarkMarket , which has finally closed this week.
Transactions worth 140 million euros
This has been announced by Europol, which has arrested a 34-year-old resident with Australian nationality in Germany during a raid that occurred over the weekend in the city of Koblenz, in the south-west of the country. The website was closed and the server deactivated on Monday, so it seems that in this case they have not left the website open as a trap to identify potential buyers of illegal products.
DarkMarket had about 500,000 users , with more than 2,400 vendors . Among the things sold on the web were drugs, counterfeit money, stolen or counterfeit bank cards, anonymous SIM cards, and malware. With these fakes, it is even possible to start a new life from scratch . More than 320,000 transactions valued at about 140 million euros , paid with Bitcoin or Monero , had been processed on the web .
The operation was in process for months, where researchers from Germany collaborated with those from other countries such as the United States, Australia, Denmark, Switzerland, Ukraine and Moldova . The service operated thanks to 20 servers located in Moldova and Ukraine, through which the police will try to find more information about the members of the network. These types of websites are accessible through Tor, or there are even Chrome extensions to enter the Deep Web .
Discovered thanks to Cyberbunker research
DarkMarket had been operating since 2014, boasting claiming to be the darknet’s first decentralized, open source exchange platform , being one of the first to integrate Bitcoin as its primary exchange currency. At the time they claimed to be the “Silk Road that the FBI will never be able to close.” We recall that Silk Road was one of the first large black markets on the Dark Web , opened in 2011 and closed in 2013.
As the authorities have detailed, the closure of DarkMarket has occurred after investigations into the hosting service Cyberbunker. This service, housed in a real bunker that was owned by NATO, has come to host websites like The Pirate Bay or Wikileaks in the past. Therefore, it can be an interesting starting point to investigate the hosting of other possible illegal websites.
As we can see, the authorities have increasingly controlled illegal activity on the Dark Web, and there is no website that lasts more than a few years as a leader in sales without attracting the attention of the authorities and ends up leading to the arrest of your operators.
