Drugs and weapons about 150 people around the world were arrested from the dark web

About 150 people were arrested all over the world who were buying or selling drugs or weapons on the dark web, in one of the largest operations ever against this hidden version of the Internet.

The operation follows the dismantling of the DarkMarket platform in January led by German police. (Picture Alliance/Getty Images)

About 150 people were arrested around the world who were buying or selling drugs or weapons on the dark web, in one of the largest operations ever against this hidden version of the Internet, officials from the European police "Europol" and the US State Department announced Tuesday. .

Europol also reported the seizure of millions of euros in cash and bitcoin, as well as drugs and weapons, in the operation called DarkHunTOR.

Europol explained that this process "was based on a series of separate but integrated steps in Australia, Bulgaria, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Britain and the United States."

The operation follows the dismantling of the DarkMarket platform in January led by German police. The platform was presented by investigators at the time as the "widest" point of purchase on the electronic black market.

In the United States, about 65 people were arrested in this process, which also allowed for the arrest of 47 people in Germany, 24 in Britain, four in Italy, four in the Netherlands and others. Several of those arrested are "important targets" for Europol.

The security forces also confiscated 26.7 million euros in cash and electronic currencies, in addition to drugs, especially 25,000 ecstasy pills and 45 firearms.

In Italy, the police also closed two illegal markets called DeepSea and Berlusconi, which together displayed "more than 100,000 advertisements for illegal products", according to Europol, which carried out its operation in coordination with the European Judicial Cooperation Unit. Eurogast".

Europol said the arrest in January of the supposed operator of the DarkMarket, a 34-year-old Australian, on the German-Danish border "provided investigators around the world with a treasure trove of evidence".

The dismantling of the “Dark Market” platform, where drugs of all kinds, counterfeit currency, stolen or counterfeit credit card data, nameless phone cards and even electronic viruses were sold, is linked to an operation dating back to September 2019 carried out in Germany against an important website offering illegal services on the dark web. It is called "Cyberbunker", according to what the prosecution announced at the time.

The data center, set up in a former NATO basement in southwest Germany, is suspected to have hosted several drug-selling platforms as well as servers used to trade images containing child pornography or cyber-attacks.

Since then, Europol's European Cybercrime Center has collected information to identify key targets, according to the agency.

The dark web, or the "Dark Web", which is a parallel version of the Internet where the anonymity of users is guaranteed, has been under increasing attacks for months by the international police.

"The aim of such operations is to tell criminals operating on the dark web that the community charged with enforcing respect for the law has the means and international partnerships to expose them," Jean-Philippe Lokoff, assistant director of operations at Europol, said on Tuesday.

For her part, Assistant US Attorney General Lisa Monaco indicated during a press conference in Washington that in the US side of the operation, 90% of the 200,000 pills seized contained counterfeit opioids and other very dangerous drugs such as fentanyl.

In turn, an officer in the French police specializing in information crimes told AFP that the operation lasted for months.

According to Rolf van Vegberg, a researcher in cybercrime at Delft University of Technology, the operation represents a change in police activity against presumed criminals active on the Internet.

"In the past, this type of operation was aimed at stopping the operators of this type of market space, and now we see police forces attacking the main sellers," he told reporters on an official Dutch channel.