DarkMarket : world’s largest illegal dark web marketplace taken down

DarkMarket, the world’s largest illegal marketplace on the dark web, has been taken offline within an international operation involving Germany, Australia, Denmark, Moldova, Ukraine, the United Kingdom (the National Crime Agency), and the USA (DEA, FBI, and IRS). Europol supported the takedown with specialist operational analysis and coordinated the cross-border collaborative effort of the countries involved.
DarkMarket in figures:

almost 500 000 users;
significantly more than 2 400 sellers;
over 320 000 transactions;
more than 4 650 bitcoin and 12 800 monero transferred.

At the present rate, this corresponds to a sum of more than €140 million. The vendors on the market mainly traded a myriad of drugs and sold counterfeit money, stolen or counterfeit credit card details, anonymous SIM cards and malware.
Germany takes the lead

The Central Criminal Investigation Department in the German city of Oldenburg arrested an Australian citizen who’s the alleged operator of DarkMarket near the German-Danish border within the weekend. The investigation, that was led by the cybercrime unit of the Koblenz Public Prosecutor’s Office, allowed officers to discover and close the market, switch off the servers and seize the criminal infrastructure – a lot more than 20 servers in Moldova and Ukraine supported by the German Federal Criminal Police office (BKA). The stored data gives investigators new leads to help expand investigate moderators, sellers, and buyers.
Europol’s involvement

Facilitated international information exchange.
Provided specialist operational support.
Provided advanced analytics that assisted the German authorities in identifying and searching for the alleged administrator.
Supported Germany in coordinating the cross-border collaborative effort involving international partners.

Europol’s Dark Web Team

Certainly one of Europol’s initiatives is to create a coordinated police force way of tackle crime on the dark web. This involves police agencies from across and beyond your EU and other relevant partners and organisations, such as for example Eurojust.

To achieve this goal, Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre (EC3) has established a separate Dark Web Team to interact with EU partners and police across the planet to lessen the size of this underground illegal economy.