Police took down DarkMarket, the world’s largest darknet marketplace

The world’s largest black marketplace on the dark web, DarkMarket, has been taken offline by law enforcement in an international operation.

DarkMarket, the world’s largest black marketplace on the dark web, has been taken offline as a result of an international operation conducted by law enforcement from Germany, Australia, Denmark, Moldova, Ukraine, the United Kingdom (the National Crime Agency), and the USA (DEA, FBI, and IRS) with the support of the Europol.

The figures related to the DarkMarket at the time of the shut down are impressive:

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

The overall transactions, at the current rate, correspond to a sum of more than €140 million.

The marketplace was an important point of aggregation for online cybercriminals that traded all kinds of drugs, counterfeit money, stolen or counterfeit credit card details, anonymous SIM cards and malware.

During the weekend, the German operation led the operation, Police in the city of Oldenburg arrested a 34-year-old Australian national who is the alleged operator of the DarkMarket.

The man believed to operate it near Germany’s border with Denmark, the police also seized more than 20 servers used by the suspect in Moldova and Ukraine.

“The investigation, which was led by the cybercrime unit of the Koblenz Public Prosecutor’s Office, allowed officers to locate and close the marketplace, switch off the servers and seize the criminal infrastructure – more than 20 servers in Moldova and Ukraine supported by the German Federal Criminal Police office (BKA). The stored data will give investigators new leads to further investigate moderators, sellers, and buyers.” reads the press release published by the Europol.

The investigation is still ongoing, data obtained as the result of the operation will be used to launch news probes again people involved the the activity of the marketplace.

“Investigators expect to use the data saved there to launch new probes against the moderators, sellers and buyers of the marketplace,” prosecutors said.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, DarkWeb)

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Pierluigi Paganini

Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.